There's more to Scottish actor Dougray Scott than his handsome looks - a passion for football and his film company for starters, writes Donald Clarke.
While browsing through some research in preparation for my meeting with the Byronically gorgeous Scottish actor Dougray Scott, I come across the following forbidding quote from an earlier interview: "I'm interested in talking about the work. I understand that people might want to know more about that. But all the other stuff I find bizarre. I find it intrusive."
Well, that's encouraging. Half an hour is an awfully long time to talk about nothing else but his new film, Liliana Cavani's Ripley's Game. The Patricia Highsmith adaptation, which sees Scott's terminally ill Englishman being duped into murder by John Malkovich's creepy sociopath, is enjoyable enough..
But we'd better start there and try to gradually finesse our way toward his early home life. What does he think of Malkovich? Is he as supernaturally odd as he seems? "I wouldn't say he's peculiar," Scott says. "He's certainly different. But he's very nice - quite feminine and relaxed and quiet and idiosyncratic. He fits easily into the world he works in. That's just who he is. Very open. Not at all dominating. We had a really good time together."
What does he think of Malkovich's interpretation of Highsmith's anti-hero Tom Ripley? How does he measure up to previous screen incarnations such as those created by Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley or Dennis Hopper in Wim Wenders's The American Friend? "I only saw The Talented Mr Ripley. But I would say that Malkovich was born to play the part. Matt Damon was good, but that was when Ripley was still a young man. Now he is older and has put that life behind him. He is living in seclusion in Italy. I think that makes him a more interesting character." Having got that out of the way and having decided to abandon any attempts at subtlety, I throw the quote at him about being unwilling to discuss anything beyond the work. He laughs wryly.
"Well, it depends what you ask me," he says. "I probably said that to someone after they'd asked me how many people I'd had sex with. I've answered loads of questions about my family and my childhood. But some things just tend to get blown out of all proportion."
Two years ago, Scott turned up to the premiere of his new film, Enigma, without his wife, the casting director Sarah Trevis. The tabloids decided to, as Trevis put it, "put two and two together and make five" and suddenly, on no real evidence, he was alleged to be having an affair with co-star Kate Winslet whose marriage had just broken up.
"Oh, that whole rubbish!" he says with real passion. He concedes that it was indeed at this point that he became wary of journalists.
"I read one fantastic quote about me being as interesting as wet biscuit. I remember the journalist in question. I met him in Edinburgh and he just wouldn't shut up about the Kate Winslet thing. He just wouldn't shut up about it and I said: 'Shut the fuck up about it or I'll throw you out the fucking window.' Now, I didn't think that was as dull as a wet biscuit." Well, quite. Thin to the point of gauntness with the sort of good hair you find adorning the heroes on the covers of Barbara Cartland novels, Scott is actually extremely personable. He seems bashful at first, but warms up markedly when we touch on one of his greatest enthusiasms: Hibernian football club. Born in Fife in 1965, he now lives in London, but managed to travel north to see Hibs eight times last season alone.
So, now that we have established that he won't bite my head off, let's talk about his childhood.
"I read Death of a Salesman when I was about 14, and my father was a salesman," he says. "My introduction to acting was watching my father become a salesman, watching what any salesman goes through when he gets up in the morning. He had this working class obsession with cleanliness and making a good first impression. Whatever feeling he had when he woke up in the morning had to be thrown out when he walked out the door to sell his fridges and his freezers."
What did they make of him at school when he told them he wanted to act? "Oh, they just laughed." They were, of course, wrong. After drama school in Swansea, he toured with various theatre companies before landing a role in the TV series Soldier Soldier. The moderately successful British comedy, Twin Town, followed, after which America took notice. In 1998, he appeared in the disaster movie, Deep Impact, and opposite Drew Barrymore in the Cinderella story, Ever After. He did not have to knock on any doors in Hollywood; they came looking for him.
"Yeah, that's pretty much true," he says. "I had gone over there with Twin Town and met this agent who really wanted to take me on. Pretty much immediately I got Ever After and Deep Impact. Then Tom Cruise saw Twin Town and flew me over to meet up with him and John Woo." The result was Woo's Mission: Impossible II in which Scott played an evil rogue agent. His performance was warmly received everywhere, and there was a feeling that he was on the point of becoming huge. That hasn't quite happened. But, given his choice of less flamboyant projects, one suspects that it is partly his own doing.
"It was all bit surreal, a bit bizarre," he says of the Mission Impossible experience. "But nice because you know it doesn't happen to many people. It was what happened after that I wasn't prepared for. After doing MI2 I just wanted to do good work. I wasn't averse to doing Hollywood pictures, but I also wanted to find room for Ripley's Game and To Kill a King and Enigma." To Kill a King, a well-received picture about the relationship between Oliver Cromwell and the Roundhead general Thomas Fairfax, almost ceased production after funds dried up in the first few weeks. But, in his role as producer, Scott fought to raise the finance and the film got finished (though there is still no confirmation of an Irish release date).
He has since expanded his interests in production by becoming a partner in Hero Films, a small company which will develop independent-minded movies.
He also secured his first major lead in 2001's Enigma, Michael Apted's adaptation of Robert Harris's novel about wartime codebreakers at Bletchley Park. But somehow profiles always come back to how he looks. Does that bother him? Is he even aware of being good-looking? "Oh yeah," he says, bellowing with laughter. "I wake up every morning and think: I'm drop-dead gorgeous. No, not at all. I was never aware of people's feelings about how I looked when I was growing up. I was actually quite shy, which is why I became an actor. It was a way of expressing things I couldn't in my personal life." He is still a little shy, a little hunched in his chair. But we get back to the subject of Hibs and he starts babbling excitedly again.
Ripley's Game is on general release