Nine years after Ken Loach gave him his first leading role in a movie, Robert Carlyle has well and truly shaken off the initial perception of some in the film industry that he was unlikely, unconventional material for leading man status. Comfortably moving between genres and extending his range in a variety of parts, the unassuming Scottish actor has emerged as one of the most interesting, risk-taking and unpredictable discoveries of the decade.
Following his sweet-natured starring role in the popular television series, Hamish Macbeth, the one-two hit punch of Trainspotting and The Full Monty catapulted Carlyle into the frontline and accelerated his work rate into full throttle. He plays a charming, cunning 18th-century highwayman in the period action movie, Plunkett and Macleane, which has just opened here. Come the beginning of June, Carlyle will be on our screens playing a psychotic cannibal in 19th-century America in Antonia Bird's film, Ravenous.
Roll on November and we will see him in the plum role of the villain in the new James Bond movie, The World Is Not Enough. And a month later should see the release of Alan Parker's film of Angela's Ashes, in which Carlyle plays the title character's good-for-nothing, alcoholic husband. And that will be followed by Danny Boyle's movie of the Alex Garland novel, The Beach, in which Carlyle will play Daffy, the ghostly mentor of the central character portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio.
As so often happens in actors' lives, none of this career trajectory was ever planned or even imagined. Now 38, Robert Carlyle was born in Glasgow and brought up by his father in a hippie commune after his mother left home when Robert was four.
Leaving school at 16, he worked as a trade union official among other jobs before his eyes were opened to the possibilities of theatre when he read Arthur Miller's allegorical play, The Crucible, when he was 21. He enrolled at the Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and found work in various repertory companies.
In 1990, dissatisfied with the repertory staples in which he found himself, Carlyle teamed up with a few friends to form their own theatre company, Rain Dog. "For the first three years I was heavily involved doing basic, straight dramas, before I got bored and decided to devise some stuff of our own and improvise," he said when we met in London recently.
Then director Ken Loach came to Glasgow, conducting auditions in Glasgow for Riff Raff, a naturalistic picture of building site labourers seeking revenge on their employer when one of them is killed in an accident on the site. "I went into the audition and I sat down," Carlyle recalls. "Then Ken just said, `Thank you', and that was basically it. I was going out the door and I turned around and said, `Oh, by the way, I used to be a painter and decorator', because I knew that was what they were looking for. `Oh, were you?' Ken said. And that was it. Thirty seconds and I was out the door.
"I was told outside that if Ken wanted to see me again that I'd get a phone call that night. So the phone duly rang. Then there was this whole series of improvisational auditions. Eventually Ken cast me in Riff Raff. And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
Over the next five years Carlyle helped Loach out on different films whenever he came to Glasgow, improvising with people Loach was auditioning. When Loach was preparing Carla's Song, his 1996 film about a Glaswegian bus conductor who becomes involved with a destitute Nicaraguan refugee, he had some other actors in mind for the driver's role and wanted someone who wasn't under the pressure of being considered to play the role to help him out in auditions.
"Then, two weeks later," Carlyle says, "Ken phoned me and said, `Would you like to do it?' I nearly dropped the phone. To work with Ken once is an honour. To work with him twice is taking the piss, really! It was great for my inner confidence that he asked me back. I felt I must still have had whatever he saw in me in the first place."
Meanwhile, Robert Carlyle was demonstrating his versatility in three scenarios scripted by Jimmy McGovern. On television Carlyle was unforgettably intense in the outstanding drama of the series, Cracker - in which he played Albie Kinsella, a football supporter boiling over with rage after witnessing the Hillsborough football stadium disaster which claimed the lives of 96 fans.
"I love Jimmy and his writing," says Carlyle. "He writes so honestly. Jimmy was at Hillsborough. He was in the stand and he saw what happened, and he had that inside him for five years, all that anger at what happened. The thing about Albie Kinsella is that he's out to kill 96 people in return. That's his aim, and the extraordinary thing about it is that he's got a point, which is why people actually go along with it and what touches people about it. He is a madman, but you have sympathy for him in some way. You understand his pain."
Carlyle was remarkably impressive in the other McGovern projects, as a young man who gets multiple sclerosis in Michael Winterbottom's television film, Go Now, and in the acute and riveting moral drama, Priest, as the lover of the young gay cleric at its centre. It is one of four films in which Carlyle has been directed by Antonia Bird.
"The double-edged sword of working with Ken was that Riff Raff was very well-received and I got praised for it, which was nice at the time," says Carlyle. "Then suddenly I became aware that people thought I was a building site worker, because Ken uses real people a lot. So I found myself struggling to get work as an actor.
"Then I met Antonia and she was making Safe, and I got to play the very first of the headcase characters I've played. She asked me to do it, but the powers-that-be at the time disagreed. They said, `No way, he's too soft to do it'. All they could see me in was Riff Raff. I was typecast right away. But Antonia fought for me and got me into the picture.
"There was another step after that, when she did Priest. After Safe, no other director in the world would have cast me in the part of the priest's lover. Antonia has been a constant source of strength for me. She understands that I'm an actor and I can, hopefully, play a lot of roles. And she was the first person to identify that."
He subsequently worked with Antonia Bird on the thriller, Face, as a politically disillusioned member of a London criminal gang, and as a cannibal in the imminent Ravenous, which co-stars Guy Pearce and is set in the 1840s, in the Sierra Nevada mountains at the end of the Mexican-American war. "I saw it last week," Carlyle says, "and it's very dark. It's very original and that's what I liked about it. It has a craziness about it that really interested me."
There was a truly sinister craziness about Begbie, the most dangerous of the "headcase characters" Carlyle has played, in Danny Boyle's heady, challenging film of Irvine Welch's Trainspotting - Carlyle firmly insists it's an anti-drugs film which has been absurdly misinterpreted in some quarters.
He played an altogether more sympathetic character in Gaz, the unemployed steelworker turning to stripping in The Full Monty, which became one of the surprise box-office hits of the decade. He says he will never forget the "complete nightmare" of the final sequence when he and his colleagues finally perform their strip show.
"I would never do it again," he says. "They could not pay me enough to do it again. That sequence took three-and-a-half days to shoot. The people in the audience were actually women they found at Chippendale-type shows, so they had no idea how much hanging around there would be.
"The first time I came on stage, I got this big cheer because they recognised me from the group of guys. We got our jackets off, and the director called, `Cut', and there was a two-hour wait to set the lights up again. And so it went on for over three days. The audience didn't know what to make of it."
I suggest that it sounds like the most elaborate striptease in history. "That's exactly what it was," Carlyle says, "although it wasn't deliberately done like that. But in the end you couldn't buy the effect it had. By the time the third day came the women were convinced it was never going to happen.
"So when we did the actual strip - which was one take, the whole way, shot from the back - and it got closer and closer to the end, the atmosphere was indescribable. The place was shaking. And when the final moment happened, it was extraordinary. I don't think I'll ever experience anything like that again."
Carlyle remains fully clothed in scruffy period costume when he plays the factuallybased Will Plunkett, one of England's most wanted highwaymen, in Jake Scott's visually imaginative and mischievously anachronistic buddy movie romp, Plunkett and Macleane. It reunites Carlyle with Jonny Lee Miller from Trainspotting, who plays the destitute, amoral aristocrat, James Macleane, and they surmount an early mutual antagonism to form a double act to rob the rich.
"It's pure, unashamed entertainment," Carlyle says. "It's irreverent, innocently subversive. I think it helped a lot that Jonny and I were so familiar with each other after doing Trainspotting together. Our characters hate each other at first and then become so close it even becomes poignant at times. There was a bond of trust between us, which helped because some of the action is so physical. At one point Macleane is pinned up against the wall with Plunkett slapping him about, so it helps if you trust your fellow actor!"
From that film's Prague locations, Carlyle moved to Dublin last autumn to co-star with Emily Watson in Angela's Ashes. "Emily is like a kindred spirit," he says. "She's one of the finest actresses I've ever worked with. Working with Alan Parker was the best, you can't get much better than that. And I enjoyed myself thoroughly in Dublin. I don't think you can avoid having a good time in Dublin."
Towards the end of his time in Dublin, Robert Carlyle was surprised to receive a call from Michael Apted, who is directing the new 007 movie, The World Is Not Enough. "He asked to see me and on my way to meet him I was thinking of going to see all those James Bond movies with my father back in the 1960s when Connery was Bond.
"I loved those movies, but another thing meant even more to me. At that time, for me at my age, Connery was the only Scottish actor there was. He was the only one on the cinema screen who spoke vaguely like me. So I sat in the Bond office at Pinewood Studios and there were all these posters of these films I'd seen as a boy. When Apted asked me if I wanted to do it, I said, of course, I do. So I'm the villain, Renard, the fox, a French Foreign Legion guy who, in the finest tradition of the Bond films, wants to blow up the world."
Carlyle says his father was delighted to hear about his casting in the Bond movie, but there was even better news for his father a few days later. Robert was to receive an OBE. "I was really surprised when I was told I was being considered for it," he says, "and when it was announced, my press agent was hounded for my reaction to it. My wife and I just sat there and laughed and laughed.
"Then I phoned my father to tell him and he felt so proud about it that it made me start to think how much this means to an older generation. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised it was an honour. Even at its most basic it's a gift - which you accept."
His euphoria is disrupted when I wonder how Ken Loach, a diehard socialist and fervent opponent of New Labour, feels about his OBE. Could this be the end of that "beautiful friendship"? Carlyle laughs, nervously.
"I don't f**king know what Ken will think. I've never courted this kind of thing, and he knows that. So if it's recognition for what I've done in my work, that's absolutely terrific. But, God knows, I shudder to think what Ken will say. Thank God he's still alive - because if he wasn't he'd be turning over in his grave."
Plunkett and Macleane is on general release