Hear my song

Iain Glen has found his voice thanks to his role in the new Irish film Small Engine Repair. The Scottish actor tells Michael Dywerabout playing a dreamer in this, his fourth movie in Ireland, and how he still loves to get a regular theatre fix - especially when it involves getting naked with Nicole Kidman

SCOTTISH actor Iain Glen reveals a rich singing voice in Small Engine Repair, Niall Heery's engaging picture of friendship, betrayal and guilt in a rural Irish town. Glen expressively plays a disillusioned dreamer, Doug, who, in his mid-40s, still holds out a glimmer of hope for success as a country music singer-songwriter.

"I've always played the guitar and the piano, but only dared to sing to my mum," says Glen, whose only earlier singing role was in the stage musical Martin Guerre. "When Niall sent me the music, I had just got to grips with GarageBand, a fairly simplistic recording software from Apple. I was able to set up a little studio in my house and I recorded the songs. It was good to do that early so he would have the excuse to get someone to dub me if he wasn't happy with it. We committed to me playing the guitar and singing the songs, and then went into a Dublin studio and did them properly."

This is the fourth Irish production for Glen after Fools of Fortune, Tara Road and Song For a Raggy Boy. "I've been very lucky in Ireland and been offered very different things as an actor. It's funny. If you are perceived as a success, it's usually for a certain role or type of role, and then people want you to do more of the same. I love the challenge of being asked to do something different, and it just so happens that I've been given that in Ireland."

He describes Small Engine Repair as a film dealing with "the battles most people go through in real life - little hopes and desires that sometimes work out for you and sometimes they don't".

Having worked as an actor for more than 20 years since he graduated from Rada, Glen must have encountered many people like Doug, whose dreams of success were dashed.

"That's true," he says. "Doug is typical of so many people who have a vocational desire that does not quite match the jobs they're doing to get by. They dream of fulfilment, but don't have the guts to commit to what they really want. Show business is really cruel. I know so many actors and directors who had the guts to pursue their ambitions and never got the chances."

In Aisling Walsh's Song For a Raggy Boy, Glen gave a chilling performance as the most sadistic teacher at an Irish reformatory school in the 1930s. "I didn't stay in character, but those boys were a tough bunch," he says. "A lot of them had been found in boxing clubs and they were quite hard work on the set. My instinct was, and Aisling encouraged it, not to befriend them too quickly, to have a presence they were a little afraid of. I could do that, not by hitting them but by being an actor who was focused and concentrating rather than asking what they had for breakfast."

Small Engine Repair reunites Glen with Raggy Boy producers Tristan Orpen Lynch and Dominick Wright of Subotica Entertainment. "I've got a lot of admiration for them," says Glen. "They're not choosing subject matter that is going to be overtly commercially viable. They're dealing with scripts that they care about. It's just a bugger of the business we're in that the harder something is to fund or to mount, the better the script usually is."

Glen gets to demonstrate his flair for comedy shortly in Mrs Ratcliffe's Revolution, co-starring with Catherine Tate as part of a British couple who move from the east midlands to East Germany in the late 1960s. "It's a lovely comedy," he says. "I play a passionate Communist who persuades his poor, suffering family to live in the GDR, where it all goes horribly wrong. It takes a very different angle to The Lives of Others, although the Stasi are in our film, too." And he underwent hours of daily prosthetics work to be turned into a mutant for another imminent release, the big-budget sequel, Resident Evil: Extinction.

Next up for Glen is playing King George VI in the HBO drama, Churchill at War, starring Brendan Gleeson as Winston Churchill, most likely followed by another theatre role.

"I try to do a play every year," he says. "Film is a director's medium, whereas theatre is owned by actors. Once a play is up and running, the director isn't even there and it kind of belongs to you."

Was he surprised at all the media hoopla when he co-starred with Nicole Kidman on stage in The Blue Room, described by one critic as "pure theatrical Viagra"?

"We were more surprised that it was received so well," he smiles. "It was a two-hander in which we each played five parts. About halfway through five weeks of rehearsal, Nic and I just looked at each other and said it was just the biggest load of wank. We did not trust it.

"That made us really work at it. There was no point in the play where we were not five minutes away from sex, either pre or post. The whole thing was very revealing. Of course, when it opened, nobody was remotely interested in me being naked, even though I was for a good 10 minutes. But there was a flash of Nicole, and that attracted all the interest."

Small Engine Repair opens next Friday; Mrs Ratcliffe's Revolution on August 24th; Resident Evil: Extinction on September 21st