Scottish actress Shauna Macdonald on her journey from Spooks to Star Wars and her new role as "an Irn-Bru Goth" in a sitcom with John Cleese

So, not The Cry then. Instead the BAFTA nod was for White Chamber, a horror-thriller set in a dystopian near-future and bearing the wince-inducing tagline “Post-Brexit, Post-Trump, Post-Mortem”. Due for release on March 29 – date ring any bells? – the film won plaudits at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival and has featured at several other festivals including London’s FrightFest.

Macdonald plays Elle Chrysler, leader of a team of scientists developing a drug which the government hopes will let its soldiers prevail in the civil war which has broken out. The action takes place over four days and for much of the time the 37-year-old Scot is locked in the white chamber of the title, where she is subjected to a series of unpleasant trials. Extreme heat, extreme cold, electric shocks, that kind of thing.

“We don’t talk about the decisions that have been made but it’s very clear that it’s no longer a united country as a result of decisions made by the government,” she explains. “We test the drug on humans in a white chamber. There’s always someone in the chamber and it’s a 50/50 divide between me and someone else. I spend a good amount of time in that white chamber getting tortured, because we have to test different samples if the drug so what’s most efficient”.

In fact, the opening 15 minutes are taken up entirely by Macdonald in the box. “That’s a lot of responsibility,” she says. “You have to think ‘Can I carry this? Is it interesting? Does anyone care about me getting tortured in a box?’ It’s challenging, but in a good way.”

Which brings us back to the last month’s BAFTA Scotland Best Actress nomination. At the glitzy award ceremony in Glasgow Macdonald was pitted against Ella Hunt, the young star of zombie musical Anna And The Apocalypse, and veteran actress Sian Phillips, nominated for Scottish director May Miles Thomas’s film Voyageuse. And guess what? Macdonald won.

Two months on, we meet in a beachside cafe in Edinburgh’s Portobello district. It’s where Macdonald grew up, where she first started acting and where she still lives with her actor husband Cal MacAninch and their three young daughters. Hunched over a hot drink, she takes time to reflect on her unexpected, though certainly not undeserved, BAFTA win.

“I know it doesn’t mean I’m better than everybody else, but it was nice,” she says. “It felt good that a group of people said that was a good job, she deserves that – and in a film that I didn’t think would be seen.”

What, then, does she expect to come her way now as a result of the win? A call from Hollywood? A mouth-watering role in a glamorous Netflix drama? Strictly Come Dancing?

“Nothing,” she says. “From my experience of 20 years of slogging in the industry and being in lots of successful films followed by months of unemployment? I don’t expect anything to happen. I’m happy to be proven wrong but personally I have made my peace with the idea that you have to absolutely do your best in each performance you get, no matter how big or small, no matter what the budget, and then as an actor that’s your job over. You can’t expect anything else from it.”

That said, the win has come at a good time in her career. The Cry was a critically-acclaimed prime-time terrestrial hit, White Chamber can now legitimately call itself award-winning and there’s also the not-so-small matter of the sitcom Macdonald will appear in come early 2019 – series two of Hold The Sunset.

The offbeat BBC One comedy stars John Cleese and Alison Steadman as retired neighbours Phil and Edith, both widowed, whose plan to start a new life together abroad is put ice when Edith’s 49-year-old son Roger (played by W1A’s Jason Watkins) returns to the family home after being kicked out by his wife.

The most successful new BBC comedy launch since 2014, it regularly pulls in audiences of six million plus and among an equally stellar supporting cast are Rosie Cavaliero, Peter Egan, Joanna Scanlan, Sue Johnston and James Cosmo. In series two Macdonald will play Cosmo’s long-lost daughter Georgie. “Think of an Irn Bru Goth,” she says of her character. “Tartan everywhere”.

As with the BAFTA Scotland nomination, Macdonald’s casting in Hold The Sunset was a complete surprise.

“I did a tape in my daughters’ room with Cal. I’d just come back from doing some work for construction workers in Ireland teaching them public speaking skills and this audition came through. With this one I thought ‘I’m totally not right for it. They’re never going to cast me – I do low budget horror films’”.

Two weeks later she was proved wrong when the producer rang, said she loved the audition tape and asked if Macdonald could go down to London for a read-through with the cast. Macdonald could and did.

“I thought I’ll just do the read-through and then they’ll realise this is not the person for the job,” she says, taking up the story. Instead she landed the part. “I went out for dinner with them [afterwards] and the producer did say she’d already cast me before my tape was even sent in. I thought ‘What have I done that made you think I would fit in a sitcom?’. It’s a mystery … I was teaching construction workers public speaking skills in Cork, which was very rewarding but it’s not what I went to drama college for three years for – and then I do this tape in my kids’ room and I’m doing a series with John Cleese, Alison Steadman, Jason Watkins, James Cosmo and Sue Johnston.”

The Monty Python star has enraged some and disappointed others with his decision to quit the UK for a life in the Caribbean and for his stance on Brexit (he voted Leave). Still, he remains a bona fide comedy icon regardless of his postcode or political inclinations. How did Macdonald find him to work with?

“I liked him,” she says. “I very much enjoyed his company. I didn’t talk about politics because I don’t want to go there sometimes. But we got on really, really well. He’s interested in people, in all the cast, in all the crew. He asks questions, he listens to you, you have conversations. He wants to find the naughty in things and he wants to find the funny in things.

“He asked me a lot about Scotland. But he took us all out for dinner, congratulated me on my BAFTA nomination, asked me a lot about my family and my kids. He was interested. It’s not the John Cleese Show when he’s in the room.”

On the subject of family and kids, Macdonald will have had plenty to say. She had her first child when she was 26 – she was shooting the Irvine Welsh-penned Wedding Belles with Shirley Henderson and Michael Fassbender when she learned she was pregnant – and now has three daughters, aged five, nine and 11. When the first two were young, she made the active decision to step back from work and is well aware of the effect it had on her career. It was only after the birth of her third daughter that she began trying to reboot it.

“I knew that if I didn’t work, I wouldn’t have a career to go back to because it’s really hard going back,” she says. “I’m 37 now and my youngest has just started primary one, so if I was only now trying to re-enter [the acting profession] I don’t think it would be possible really.”

But if The Cry, the BAFTA win and Hold The Sunset are indicators that act two of Shauna Macdonald’s career is up and running, let’s not forget about act one. It too started early. A shy child with a lisp, she was sent by her mother to take drama classes at the Brunton Youth Theatre in nearby Musselburgh and then, as the acting bug bit, she joined Paisley Youth Theatre (PACE). Among the young actors she came into contact with there were James McAvoy and David Sneddon.

“I realised that acting wasn’t about being the loudest, having jazz hands or being the most confident,” she says of her days at PACE. “It was about discovering and experiencing situations with your peers and finding the drama, the funny, the layers. Mhairi Gilbert, who ran it, treated us like actors, so we put on these amazing productions and something just clicked. I thought this is definitely what I want to do with the rest of my life.”

When she applied to study acting at Glasgow's Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, McAvoy was already there and helped her with her audition pieces. She was still a student when she landed her first starring role alongside Kevin McKidd in 2004 drama The Rocket Post though she was wise enough to return to Glasgow to finish her studies.

She followed The Rocket Post with a series-long run as Sam Buxton in high-tech BBC spy thriller Spooks, but it was in Neil Marshall’s all-female 2005 horror The Descent that the real breakthrough came. Macdonald plays Sarah, one of six gal pals on a weekend caving expedition which turns into a fight for survival after they encounter a gang of subterranean nasties.

Over a decade on the film’s cult appeal shows no sign of abating – so much so that Macdonald still appears at fan conventions to talk about it.

“It was ground-breaking,” she says. “Unfortunately, it’s still unusual for six women to carry a film, and if it does happen there’s a backlash like with Ghostbusters. It’s really frustrating and really boring that in 2018 we’re not doing enough.”

Still, you’d have to hope that if it was made today the cast would be able to avoid some of the questions they faced the first time round. “The girls and I had to listen to questions from journalists like ‘Did you all get your periods at the same time?’” she recalls. “So, it was ground-breaking but we were always fighting against this nonsense. We didn’t do FHM or any of the lads’ magazines because we don’t want to. I said I’d rather do Gardeners’ World.”

But if Shauna Macdonald stands on the threshold of a range of new opportunities, it doesn’t mean there aren’t still frustrations and obstructions. Some of these surface when I ask about her time on the set of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It was made largely at Pinewood Studios, which is where she shot The Descent and some of Spooks, though this time the experience was very different.

“There was a bunch of us, really good actors,” she recalls. “And over the course of a day we were like ‘OK, I get it. We’re here to make the background look good’.” To her mind it was like being at a fan convention, except the woman dressed as Carrie Fisher really was Carrie Fisher.

“It was an out-of-body experience but in a frustrating way because I’m not in it. It’s like I was allowed in to watch the actors act. I don’t want to do that. I want to act. I got a line, but it was cut. I’m in it enough for people to go ‘Was that Shauna?’, though my dad went to see it and went to the toilet and missed me. The irony is I was too skint at the time to go and see it and I still haven’t.”

Even on the night of the BAFTA win, looking around the room and listening to the conversations, the difficulties of her chosen profession were driven home to her.

“Scotland still struggles to produce the amount of film and telly that we want. And we still don’t have the studio. We can’t hold on to the actors and technicians because there’s no work here. At the BAFTAs Nicola Sturgeon had to listen to maybe eight comments from people demanding a studio. She got the message. But we’re not doing enough. We’ve got the talent and we’ve got the scenery. We know this. We just have to make the opportunities and get this studio built. Somewhere. Anywhere.”

Since then, of course, Screen Scotland has announced that a warehouse building in Leith in Edinburgh has been earmarked for just such an undertaking – if a private developer can be found to take on the project. Still, it’s a start.

What has Macdonald’s focus right now, however, is a project even closer to her Portobello home and, I sense, to her heart: Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, enjoying its final performance tonight at the former Portobello Old Parish Church on Bellfield Street. The subject of Scotland’s first urban community buyout in 2017, the church is now home to the Edinburgh Youth Theatre, of which Macdonald is artistic director. For her it’s a labour of love, a way to give something back to her community, pass on experiences (and maybe a Star Wars anecdote or two) and give to the next generation of Scottish acting talent some of the same help, encouragement and galvanising inspiration she herself received. Because who knows, there could be another Shauna Macdonald in there somewhere.