Capaldi, Cox and more: Scotland's 10 best actors

Forget Doctor Who. Peter Capaldi is here purely for the swearing. In Armando Iannucci’s political sitcom The Thick of It, Capaldi gave a masterclass in obscenity, most of which we can’t reproduce in a family newspaper. Capaldi’s turn as the none-more-scary spin doctor Malcolm Tucker was a career highlight in a CV that began, more or less, with the actor’s appearance as a gentle, non-threatening beta male in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero in 1983. He was memorable in a small role as the missing uncle in Gavin Millar’s BBC’s adaptation of Iain Banks’s novel The Crow Road. But Malcolm Tucker changed his fortunes before he went time-travelling.

Alastair Sim

It is a danger of our contemporary world where anything more than 10 minutes old is forgotten that a talent such as Alastair Sim’s can be reduced to a useful Twitter meme. (We don’t have to call it if we don’t want to.) The Edinburgh actor may be the most memorable on-screen Scrooge (well, it’s him or Michael Caine in The Muppet Christmas Carol), but he is also one of the reliable joys of postwar British cinema, whether he was dragging up in the St Trinian’s films or appearing in Hue & Cry or Green for Danger. 

Bill Paterson

There may be other actors who can provide a link between Dennis Potter, Bill Forsyth, John Le Carre, Iain Banks, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Dad’s Army and the Spice Girls, but off the top of my head I can’t think who that might be. Paterson, who grew up in Dennistoun, started his acting career at the Citizens Theatre in 1967 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s frankly a form of faint praise to call him reliable, but he is. He also offers a vision of Scottish masculinity that allows for sensitivity and compassion (these things don’t always go together). To cherry pick highlights, he brings a dreamy, heartbroken drift to his role as DJ Dicky Bird in Forsyth’s Comfort and Joy and the voice of reason (ish) as Waller-Bridge’s dad in Fleabag.

Brian Cox

I’m sure he’s great in Succession but I’ve not watched it. However, I remember the chilling impression he made as Hannibal Lector (or Hannibal Lecktor as the film had it) in Michael Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter. Cox’s career has been a long haul up through the ranks as character actor to arrive at the present moment when his name appears above the titles. His ability to be bullish and boorish at will helped. But he was always a subtler actor than some of the early roles allowed, and one of the joys of his take on Bob Servant is that it showcased his ability to make us laugh.

Ian Holm

Hands up. I’m cheating here. Ian Holm was born to Scottish parents but he was raised in England. However, who would not want to claim Holm given his CV? A great Shakespearian actor in the 1960s he became one of the most reliable character actors in British and American cinema from the 1970s to the 1990s. If he is best remembered for spewing milky android blood in Ridley Scott’s Alien, it’s his performance in Mike Newell’s Dance With a Stranger, in which he played, beautifully, the role of Miranda Richardson’s admirer in this retelling of the Ruth Ellis story that has stuck in the memory for nearly 40 years.

(Image: Peter Capaldi)

Ewan McGregor

We should address the Trainspotting problem, I suppose. The problem being, I still don’t really love the movie. It always felt like it romanticised, even sentimentalised the radge energy of Irvine Welsh’s novel. But its impact can’t be disputed and nearly everyone in it became a star. 

Which raises the question, who to choose for this list? Ewen Bremner, Kevin McKidd, Peter Mullan all have had worthwhile careers in the wake of Danny Boyle’s movie. But Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle have gone on to become proper stars.

Carlyle may have more range, but I’m tempted to opt for McGregor, if only because he offers a different vision of Caledonian masculinity: a cocksure, self-confident (sexually confident even) Scottishness that is only now beginning to face up to the fact that youth fades and age is inevitable.

Set aside his time in Star Wars and you have a CV that takes in films by directors as diverse as Peter Greenaway (The Pillow Book), Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!), Roman Polanski (The Ghost) and Todd Haynes (his Iggy-inspired performance as Curt Wild is the best thing about Haynes’s glam rock tribute movie). In recent years he has been stretching himself on TV in A Gentleman in Moscow and Halston. 

James McAvoy

McAvoy, one could argue, is what would happen if you fused McGregor and Carlyle’s DNA. He has the charm and confidence of the former and the range and sense of threat the latter can bring. The Glaswegian actor has spent the last 20 years working on … well, everything, it has sometimes seemed. Marvel movies, adaptations of children’s fantasy classics, M Night Shyamalan chillers, Shakespeare (his take on Macbeth on the London stage was described by the theatre critic Michael Billington as “almost brutally physical”), war movies, crime movies, spy movies, horror movies, or to put it another way, from Atonement to Atomic Blonde and all points in between.

McAvoy is about to appear in Speak No Evil which looks like it’s going to double down on his talent for charming nastiness. And, if we’re lucky, we might get to see his directorial debut soon. California Schemin’ is based on the true-life story of two Dundonians who conned the music industry into thinking they were American. It’s currently in pre-production.

Robert Buchanan

This is a what-if story? Some years ago my eldest daughter went to an acting class in Stirling at the Tolbooth. Now and again I’d spot Robert Buchanan ghosting around the building where he worked. Buchanan had given up acting by this point which always seemed a shame. He had been such a vivid, funny presence in Bill Forsyth’s early films, That Sinking Feeling and Gregory’s Girl. It’s a pity we didn’t see more of him. But what we did was joyous.

(Image: Robert Buchanan)

Sean Connery

We could debate the difference between a film star and a film actor at this point. Connery was very much the former, a blunt, brute presence on screen who offered a vision of masculinity that was all force and little finesse (and now belongs to another time). But he was self-aware enough to recognise the archetype he represented and, from time to time, play with it. He also took more risks than is sometimes acknowledged; notably Hitchcock’s Marnie, in which he plays a rapist, and wearing little more than a loincloth in John Boorman’s rickety, faintly deranged science fantasy Zardoz. In his later years he knew exactly how to exploit his own star persona and in doing so added hugely to films such as The Untouchables and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Not Scotland’s greatest film actor by any means, but definitely Scotland’s greatest gift to cinema.

Hans Matheson

Near the start of this century I travelled to Prague to meet Hans Matheson on the set of ITV’s adaptation of Doctor Zhivago. The Lewis-born actor had been cast as the titular character in a career-making role opposite Keira Knightley who was already making a name for herself after appearing in Bend It Like Beckham. Well, we know what happened to Knightley. Matheson, maybe not so much. He remained a presence on our screens in the years that followed, though maybe not as notable as his talent (and, let’s face it, his looks) perhaps deserved. 

In 2008 he turned up as Alec d’Urberville in David Nicholls’s adaptation of Hardy’s novel and he brought out the casual cruelty of the man while also hinting that there might be a heart buried somewhere beneath the sly selfishness. In Guy Richie’s take on Sherlock Holmes he was a straight-ahead bad guy. Film roles in Clash of the Titans and 300: Rise of an Empire followed, and he impressed in the TV drama Jericho, but he’s not been seen on our screens for a while now. More’s the pity.