Bond baddie Carlyle strips away the hype

By Marianne Gray

With all his clobber on, Robert Carlyle is not much like his The Full Monty poster which had women twitching from the Clyde to Caracas.

There is no delicious smirk, no chest that fills one with impure thoughts, no crumpled blue shirt.

When we met in London to discuss his latest film, The World Is Not Enough, there was hardly a square centimetre of him on show - a man who is a million leagues away from The Full Monty, now posing as the baddie in the new 007 film.

We both knew that the dreaded question about going full-frontal starkers in front of 300 drooling women for the last scene in The Full Monty had to be asked before we hit on Bond.

"Yes it was a very scary sensation which I counteracted marginally by getting very drunk," he says.

"I didn't think about looking to see if it had shrivelled up out of embarrassment. I certainly didn't do anything like that in the Bond movie.

"After I got the part as Renard, the baddie, there happened to be a few Bond films on TV. I was looking at Christopher Walken and Robert Shaw and thinking, 'Bloody hell, there's quite a tradition of heavyweight actors who have been Bond baddies.' So obviously I took it quite seriously.

"It has proved good for me because although it's a big-budget film, it's still got a British feel to it. Better still it has a Scottish feel as that link was made when Sean Connery played the part all those years ago."

The way Carlyle sees it, nothing is going to change much now that he's become Scotland's hottest toddy since Ewan McGregor.

"I still live two miles from where I was born in Glasgow [with his wife, makeup artist Anastasia Shirley] and still have friends that I knew even before I was acting, so I feel fundamentally the same person even though so much has happened to me at this point.

"If you want to get sucked into the celebrity dump, that's up to you.

"Look what happened to Hugh Grant. He suffered press murder. He's a good actor, but you'd never know it.

"It's now quite difficult for me to talk about social issues and things that really do matter and are close to my heart. Because I now lead a very privileged life, how the hell could I comment?"

Carlyle has spent a career out of making psychos human (in Trainspotting as Begbie, in Cracker as Albie and in the recent Ravenous as a man with a taste for human flesh).

He also immerses himself in roles that a lesser man would lose altogether: the bus-driving politico in Ken Loach's Carla's Song, the building-site idealist in Loach's Riff-Raff, Linus Roache's ignored gay lover in Antonia Bird's Priest, and the dope-smoking copper in the hit TV series Hamish Macbeth.

His last film was the highwayman period piece Plunkett and MacLeane, with Jonny Lee Miller. Next up is Alan Parker's film version of Frank McCourt's book Angela's Ashes, shot in Ireland with Emily Walker.

So far there have been no shelvable Carlyle films. He seems to have the intelligence and craft to choose carefully as he goes, an asset that recently earned him an OBE."

Carlyle, 39, hasn't been making films for long. Acting got him late. He left school ("I guess you could say I was the troublemaker") with zero qualifications at 16 to follow his father Joseph into his painting and decorating business (Riff-Raff style).

He had grown up on an estate that he describes as the Glaswegian equivalent of Leith (Trainspotting) and moved around hippy colonies in Glasgow with his dad.

His mother Elizabeth worked for the Glasgow Bus Company (Carla's Song style) and walked out on his dad when little Bobby was four.

He hadn't seen her for 30 years until a tabloid tracked her down a few years ago.

Carlyle was incensed and has said that if other stuff like that happens he is prepared to have it out with the journalist concerned and go to jail for it.

The acting came when, at 21, he came across a paperback of Arthur Miller's play of witchcraft and Macarthyism, The Crucible.

When he read it, something clicked.

He went to the Glasgow Arts Centre, then received a grant to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in 1983.

"But I hated all that stuff they taught me while thumping out the rawness and energy I had," he says.

"So to unlearn it I formed a small experimental, often political theatre company called Rain Dog."

He moved on to TV, being noticed first in Antonia Bird's homelessness film Safe.

"It was the first of the crazy kind of psychotic gang movies and it just went from there.

"Now it has reached epic proportions.

"But I don't have too many ambitions. I just want to remain true to myself."