New Town Thriller

DOUGRAY Scott has come a long way since his Glenrothes boyhood, but, says the actor, growing up in Fife is what laid the foundations of his career and international success.

IT IS the day after meeting Dougray Scott that it suddenly hits me: he doesn't smile. Actually, that's not quite true. It's more that on the rare occasions when the 42-year-old Scot does curve his lips in a skywards direction, it doesn't suit him; a bit like when Gordon Brown breaks into one of his grimaces. It's as though Scott's face – rugged, bronzed, James Bond-like – wasn't made to grin, chortle or look especially animated. It was made to look brooding. Renowned as a man of few words, perhaps it is not surprising that he is also a man of few expressions.

Scott has said that he is a product of where he comes from: Glenrothes, in Fife, where his mother still lives in the same house he grew up in opposite a whisky bottling plant. I wonder if this tendency to keep everything – including his expressions – zipped up and buttoned down has something to do with his background. At one point, when I ask him if his mother is proud of his success, he squirms with embarrassment, and if his tan would permit it I'm sure he would blush. "I think so, yeah, I don't know," he mutters. "People ask these questions of Scots and we're like, yeah, move on…"

He also tells me he is a private person, and even that confession seems to make him uneasy. "Ultimately, the personality I have and my thought processes are shaped by where I was brought up," he explains. "I still have a Scottish voice, and I like being Scottish. It's who I am. Everything I've learned in terms of how I deal with people and what I think comes from Scotland – my father, my mother, my school."

How does that work, I wonder, living as he does in LA with his actress wife Claire Forlani, whom he married in Italy last June. Surely it's about as far removed from Glenrothes as you can get? "Obviously I don't live there any more and I live in a world that is quite far removed, but I'm not at all negative or embarrassed about where I come from," he insists. "I know a lot of people who try to change their history, whereas I'm very honest about it. My outlook begins in Fife."

He is in high spirits today, he assures me, and that is largely thanks to being in Edinburgh. He is filming Richard Jobson's upcoming film, New Town Killers, a thriller also starring Alastair Mackenzie, in which they play a couple of reckless, mercenary private bankers preying on those less fortunate than them just for the fun of it. A crew member tells me that, the night before, they shot a scene in which Scott's character had to beat someone up. Everyone was genuinely terrified.

For Scott, the best part of filming around Edinburgh, in areas including Leith, the New Town, Calton Hill and Muirhouse, has been seeing a city he knows so well in a different light. Later, I go on set to watch him in a scene on the rain-lashed, wind-whipped roof of a disused building off Princes Street. He gestures towards the view of the Old Town and the Castle and says: "See? I bet you've never seen the city from up here before."

At work, Scott is quiet and serious. The on-set photographer shows me a picture of the actor he snapped between takes. His expression is thunderous as he sits in a chair, hunched and intense, waiting to shoot the next scene, and I remember him saying earlier: "As an actor you mine the dark places of your own psyche to try to bring a character to life."

We meet in Scott's trailer, parked on Regent Road, with views across to Arthur's Seat. The cast and crew are currently on night shoots, which means that, although it is early evening, he has just eaten breakfast. He looks tired, as though he has just woken up. "No, I've been up for ages but I only slept a couple of hours," he says. He rarely sleeps more than four hours a night, especially when he is working, and seems to find it difficult to relax. Sure enough, when I ask him what, apart from watching and playing football and golf, he likes doing, he says: "I'd like to learn to be able to do nothing."

As well as finding it hard to relax, it is clear that Scott is shy, a quality that always comes as something of a surprise in his line of work. He definitely falls into the category of actors who like to hide behind their characters.

The tiny room inside Scott's trailer is warm, but his long, grey coat stays on over jeans, smart shoes and a navy V-neck jumper. His hair is neat and bouffant and his skin is a suspiciously even tone of toffee-brown. The impression is classic, American, restrained, safe. Towards the end of our hour together – when I ask him whether he gets fed up talking about being passed over for Bond in favour of Daniel Craig – he gets up to smoke at the door. (His children – ten-year-old twins Gabriel and Eden, by his first wife Sarah Trevis, who divorced him in 2005 – want him to quit, he says, but he is a creature of habit.) And for the moment at least he's on to other issues, though we do manage to return to Bond later.

Scott had his sights set on working with Jobson, who is also from Fife ("We were brought up three miles apart," he says proudly), for many years. The filmmaker and former Skids frontman had sent Scott scripts in the past, but the actor was never available. The last time Scott worked in his home country was in 2001, when he shot scenes in Oban for Enigma, during the making of which he was rumoured to be getting cosy with his co-star Kate Winslet.

Since then, he has become best known for his television work, playing Moses in The Ten Commandments and a professional thief in Heist, a US series that was billed as the next 24 but ended up being axed after just five episodes. Mostly, though, millions around the world know him for his turn as Teri Hatcher's love interest in the third season of Desperate Housewives. His character, a suave publisher with a cod English accent just on the wrong side of Cary Grant, raised more than a few eyebrows – and laughs – back home in Scotland.

Scott is effusive – well, as close to it as he gets – on the subject of working with Jobson, and watching them on set together later, it is obvious there is a kinship between the two. "He is one of the most knowledgeable directors I've worked with in Britain," Scott says. "It's kind of surreal to work with someone from Fife, because you're not supposed to make films where we come from. You realise how quickly you revert back to the vernacular when you're with someone from the same area. I think the others have been bemused by us."

Scott's speech, incidentally, has a peculiar, rather formal tic. Although his Fife brogue remains intact, he is also, unexpectedly, a fan of the kind of English the Queen might use. "When one is forced to look back on one's life, I guess one can say, 'Yes, I'm proud,'" he says. "But one has not finished yet."

Scott admires Jobson because he has done so many different things with his life and "broken out of the mould he was cast in from an early age". Is that something Scott identifies with? "Completely. You have to break out of a lot of things. It's a Scottish thing to have quite low self-esteem, a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy of non-success. People like it initially when you have success but then it's like, 'Okay, we've had enough of you,' and it's on to the next one. It's quite a bizarre attitude."

In fact, Scott has been on the flip side of this equation. When Heist was axed and he didn't get chosen for Bond, many commented on the fact that he hadn't enjoyed the same level of success as his contemporaries Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle. "People always want a story," he says, when I bring up this touchy subject. "I've inadvertently seen and read things about other people and it's horrendous what is said. It gets so personal, it's ridiculous. I don't read any of that stuff and it's not relevant to me. I'm not dependent on it." And that's as much as he'll say on Bond.

It's when he is talking about Scotland and his family that Scott is most comfortable. He is surprisingly open about his marriage, and is clearly smitten with Forlani, whom he was introduced to by a director friend two and a half years ago. She has already been to visit him in Edinburgh once during the five-week shoot and is coming again. "She is extraordinary," he says. "I've never met anyone like her. She's really special, you know… to me." He wasn't sure he wanted to marry again but "it came along and felt right. We have a great, really healthy relationship and a real understanding of each other's psyches and needs. She's incredibly supportive." When I ask if he would like more children, I'm even treated to a rare grin. "Who knows, who knows… we'll see."

His twins are currently staying in Fife with his sister while he is living in Edinburgh's New Town. He has been enjoying wandering the streets of the capital. "I feel very comfortable in America but I just fit in here," he says. His children have visited him on set, something his son, in particular, enjoys. He took them to a Hibs game at the weekend and, when I ask him what he misses most about Scotland, he replies without hesitation: "The football."

"They've been travelling since they were born," he says of his children, who live in London with their mother but regularly go on location with Scott, including, in recent years, Los Angeles, Bulgaria and Montreal. "They have a completely different life to the one I was brought up with but that's no bad thing." Scott was very close to his father, who died 12 years ago, and it's a bond he hopes to emulate with his own children.

His father was a jack-of-all-trades, who served in the war, worked as a salesman for 33 years, as a printer for the Daily Express and in a sausage factory; he also played football for Queen's Park and acted with Glasgow's left-wing Unity Theatre. Scott didn't speak much with him about his days treading the boards – that was before he was born – but he remembers watching him going into performance mode when he was pursuing a sale.

When Scott was 14 he read Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and realised what he wanted to do. "It made a connection between me, acting and my father. There was something exciting about reading a play by an American that was so relevant to me. It made me want to be a part of it. Also, acting gets one out of one's shell so it was an opportunity to use something to come out of oneself. It still is." I'm starting to realise that the formal third-person singular tends to raise its regal head when Scott finds himself getting personal (a rather useful cue for me) and he is trying to distance himself from the words.

He soon returns to the first person when we go back to his father, a subject to which he often gravitates. "He was 50 when I was born so he had already done a lot," he says. "I've learned so much from him, but you have to find your own way with your children. My son is how I was when I was his age, constantly wanting to be with his dad. It must be in the genes. I do take him to play golf, like my father did with me, but I want him to like it because he likes it, not because his dad does."

Ah, golf. We couldn't keep off the putting green forever. Scott is the eighth best golfer in Hollywood, with a handicap of six. He tells me a story about a party he went to in LA where Bill Clinton – a friend of his wife's – invited him to play with him and Tiger Woods. He turned down the offer because he was filming Heist. Surely that is a regret that keeps him awake at night? "No… well, you know," he says. "I just said, 'I can't, I'm filming,' and he said, 'Okay, next time.' The next day the producers told me I should have called in sick."

It is an illustration of Scott's work ethic, or perhaps his penchant for self-denial. He seems to relish hard graft ("I need to work") and what he calls "the gypsy lifestyle" that comes with being an actor and living between LA, London and wherever else he might be filming. This, equally, is why he finds it difficult to relax. He is hard on himself, I think, and sometimes motivated by a lack of self-confidence.

"When I'm in hotels I wish I was in my house, and then when I'm in my house I get itchy feet," he confesses. "It's a very Scottish thing, worrying that someone might come and take everything off you. In order to prove that you're worthy of it you have to keep on working." Realising he might have revealed too much, he quickly reverts to formality: "One never feels comfortable doing nothing."

New Town Killers will be released next year