Post by Leanne on May 24, 2009 13:33:55 GMT -5
Mikado about nothing
Sunday Herald, The , Feb 13, 2000 by Peter Ross
He became a leprechaun to keep the tax man at bay. Now Kevin McKidd has gone from myth to music and a film about Gilbert and Sullivan. Peter Ross reports
YOU might imagine that starring in a string of acclaimed movies would be the fast-lane to cash heaven, but not for Kevin McKidd. The 26-year-old Scots actor had to dress up as a leprechaun to get his hands on a pot of gold. Having spent the first half of last year out of work and in the red, McKidd leaped at the chance of playing Jericho O'Grady in The Magical Legend Of The Leprechauns, a US mini- series starring Whoopi Goldberg and Randy Quaid.
"Basically I had spent six months working in pubs in London and doing mountain bike couriering for #3 a package because the tax man had got me," says McKidd in the deep but soft tones that reveal his roots in the north-east of Scotland. "He totally cleaned me out. I didn't have a bean and I was about to have my house taken off me. Work had dried up for some reason. No meetings, no nothing. I thought that was it. Then this leprechaun thing came up and I thought: 'Right! I don't give a s**t, I'll do it. Just f****** give me the money.' So it was one of them, a doing it for the money job.
"It was good laugh, though. Roger Daltrey was playing the fairy prince. It was one of those Easter Sunday NBC television extravaganzas. It had a big, big budget but it wasn't exactly high art."
Today, McKidd is thankfully free of ginger whiskers and emerald green knickerbockers. Instead, he's plainly but fashionably dressed in a grey jumper, baggy carpenter jeans and a pair of white Adidas trainers. His curly hair is impossibly blonde. He's reclining on a couch looking surprisingly relaxed and amused as he relates the story of how penury forced him into such an unusual career choice.
And, make no mistake, it is bizarre. This, after all, is the man who played Tommy in Trainspotting, a critical and commercial smash, not to mention a cultural touchstone. Yet he's far from embarrassed about his turn as a little 'Oirish' fella.
"I'm just a jobbing actor, really," he shrugs, humbly. "I'm at the stage now where I'm a bit more sensible with my money. That's one of the dangers for young actors - you get a bit of financial success and you go mental and blow it all. But I've managed to get myself back on an even keel. I know that I can hold out through dry patches now and I won't have to take any more leprechaun jobs for a while."
This is putting it mildly. McKidd has two major projects coming up - he plays Vronsky in a Channel 4 adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and, from Friday, you can see him (and fellow Trainspotting veteran Shirley Henderson) in Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh's biopic of light opera legends Gilbert and Sullivan.
Leigh, a Gilbert and Sullivan fanatic, focuses on the preparations for the world premiere of The Mikado in 1885. McKidd plays Durward Lely, an Arbroath-born singer and lead tenor in the company. His backstage bitching with Richard Temple (Timothy Spall) is one of the delights of the film.
"Durward Lely's dad was the factor and housekeeper of this big estate just outside Arbroath owned by a rich landowner," says McKidd, who before filming spent months thoroughly researching his character in order to cope with Leigh's demanding improvisational methods. "One day the landowner heard him singing in church and sent him, as a young man, to Milan for eight years to learn to become an opera singer. He came back and had some success in London before joining the D'Oyly Carte company."
McKidd's research took him to Arbroath where he discovered a vault full of original letters which Durward Lely sent from Milan to his father and benefactor. "And there were his memoirs, which have never been published, sitting on a shelf of this mansion house which he was brought up in. It was just pure luck. I just went up there to look about and all this stuff turned up.
"I managed to track down one of his relations who is still alive. This woman was given this lucky charm when she was a little, little girl by Durward Lely when he was an old man. It was a little ivory horse that he wore around his neck whenever he was on stage. And she gave me that as a present because I was playing this part."
MIKE Leigh is full of praise for McKidd's research: "Kevin decided off his own bat to jump on a plane and go up to Arbroath. He went there and pottered around and said: 'I'm playing this guy called Durward Lely, is there anything on him?' and someone said: 'Actually, there's an unpublished autobiography in the drawer.' Your Gilbert and Sullivan freaks will be furious because they would pay huge amounts of money for something like that and there it was and nobody had ever heard of it."
McKidd's career is shifting up a gear and the same can be said of his personal life. His resume is packed with doomed lovers and his own relationships have been similarly fraught - "I've had some pretty complex ones along the way, some ups and downs and turbulence" - but is currently very happy. He got married in July last year to a girl who works in the box office of London's Royal Court Theatre. They met six months before that and McKidd proposed in January while he was in New York starring in an Almeida Theatre production of Racine's Brittanicus. He says that although he often still thinks of himself as very young, being married makes him feel more grown up: "You realise that you've got to work. It was okay not being able to have a mortgage when I was on my own, but I have a bit more responsibility now." But he admits to being slightly freaked out by the idea that any children they have are going to be English and jokes he'll have to give his "Cockney kid" Scottish voice-coaching.
ShareEmailDiggFacebookTwitterGoogleDeliciousStumbleUponNewsvineLinkedInMy YahooTechnoratiRedditPrintRecommend0For all the diversity of McKidd's work, he may be forever doomed to be known as that guy in Trainspotting who wasn't on the poster. He finds this irritating but also acknowledges it's pretty good shorthand for explaining who he is. "I met Tom Hanks yesterday," he says with an admirable lack of emphasis, "and he was like: 'Hey, I saw you in Topsy-Turvy, what else have you been in?' I told him I was in Trainspotting and when he asked what part I said: 'I was the guy who wasn't on the poster.' He was 'Oh sure! okay!'."
McKIDD was in talks with the Oscar-bagging actor about a part in Bandit Brothers, an American TV adaptation of Saving Private Ryan which Hanks will direct. It's a glamour job for sure, but McKidd's favourite role of his own remains Johnny, the cuckolded husband in The Soft Touch, one of The Acid House triptych of films. The Acid House was a flop, but McKidd's performance was extraordinary, providing a beating heart in a film which was otherwise pronounced dead on arrival.
"What I liked about it was that it was about a Scottish male lead who wasn't macho," he says. "There are a lot of Scottish characters written as cheeky chappies or hard men, but nothing's ever done about the thousands of guys who work in Safeways and what kind of life they have.
"I thought it was a really valid piece of work but it was slated. I think it was Loaded [he sneers out the title] who said that by the end of it you couldn't stand this character because he's such a f****** wimp that he deserved everything he got. But I don't think that was the point of the film at all. It was about a bloke who was brought up quite traditionally in Scotland and was basically born in the wrong place. Probably if he'd had a middle-class upbringing he'd have been very f****** brainy and doing great guns and having a great life. But he was just brought up on the wrong side of the f****** tracks."
If you think that this rant is a little overboard as a response to a critical drubbing, you should be aware that McKidd feels the material has personal resonance. "It's not like I had an abusive time when I was a kid," he says. "I had a great childhood but I always felt different. I was brought up on a council estate but I never felt that was where I was going to end up. But Johnny does end up there even though he knows he has the ability to get out, and he ends up getting f***** over because he is trying to be a good person."
There's a lot of passion and seriousness there. McKidd may shrug off praise and nonchalantly describe himself as a jobbing actor, but he is undeniably proud of his film, TV and stage work. "Yeah, I am," he admits. "By no means have I got connections in the right places. I'm not part of the Oxford crew like a lot of actors are, and I was never part of the Glasgow fraternity, that whole network there, because I'm from Elgin. I'm kind of doing it on my own.
"I'm proud that I was never sucked into those little clubs and cliques. There's been plenty of them along the way that I have witnessed and always kept away from. That's from my childhood as well. It's not that I was a loner, but I always kept to my own way."
Kevin McKidd, then. Whether playing a junkie, a leprechaun or a famous tenor, he's an actor you can always rely on to strike the right note.
Topsy-Turvy opens on Friday l Review, Pages 8 and 9 Born in Elgin in 1973, Kevin McKidd is a graduate of Queen Margaret College in Edinburgh. He earned his stripes in theatre, acting for the likes of Wildcat. However, his breakthrough came thanks to a double whammy of roles in Trainspotting and Small Faces. Topsy-Turvy is his latest film and he can be seen later this year in a Channel 4 adaptation of Anna Karenina
findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4156/is_20000213/ai_n13946281/?tag=content;col1
Sunday Herald, The , Feb 13, 2000 by Peter Ross
He became a leprechaun to keep the tax man at bay. Now Kevin McKidd has gone from myth to music and a film about Gilbert and Sullivan. Peter Ross reports
YOU might imagine that starring in a string of acclaimed movies would be the fast-lane to cash heaven, but not for Kevin McKidd. The 26-year-old Scots actor had to dress up as a leprechaun to get his hands on a pot of gold. Having spent the first half of last year out of work and in the red, McKidd leaped at the chance of playing Jericho O'Grady in The Magical Legend Of The Leprechauns, a US mini- series starring Whoopi Goldberg and Randy Quaid.
"Basically I had spent six months working in pubs in London and doing mountain bike couriering for #3 a package because the tax man had got me," says McKidd in the deep but soft tones that reveal his roots in the north-east of Scotland. "He totally cleaned me out. I didn't have a bean and I was about to have my house taken off me. Work had dried up for some reason. No meetings, no nothing. I thought that was it. Then this leprechaun thing came up and I thought: 'Right! I don't give a s**t, I'll do it. Just f****** give me the money.' So it was one of them, a doing it for the money job.
"It was good laugh, though. Roger Daltrey was playing the fairy prince. It was one of those Easter Sunday NBC television extravaganzas. It had a big, big budget but it wasn't exactly high art."
Today, McKidd is thankfully free of ginger whiskers and emerald green knickerbockers. Instead, he's plainly but fashionably dressed in a grey jumper, baggy carpenter jeans and a pair of white Adidas trainers. His curly hair is impossibly blonde. He's reclining on a couch looking surprisingly relaxed and amused as he relates the story of how penury forced him into such an unusual career choice.
And, make no mistake, it is bizarre. This, after all, is the man who played Tommy in Trainspotting, a critical and commercial smash, not to mention a cultural touchstone. Yet he's far from embarrassed about his turn as a little 'Oirish' fella.
"I'm just a jobbing actor, really," he shrugs, humbly. "I'm at the stage now where I'm a bit more sensible with my money. That's one of the dangers for young actors - you get a bit of financial success and you go mental and blow it all. But I've managed to get myself back on an even keel. I know that I can hold out through dry patches now and I won't have to take any more leprechaun jobs for a while."
This is putting it mildly. McKidd has two major projects coming up - he plays Vronsky in a Channel 4 adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and, from Friday, you can see him (and fellow Trainspotting veteran Shirley Henderson) in Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh's biopic of light opera legends Gilbert and Sullivan.
Leigh, a Gilbert and Sullivan fanatic, focuses on the preparations for the world premiere of The Mikado in 1885. McKidd plays Durward Lely, an Arbroath-born singer and lead tenor in the company. His backstage bitching with Richard Temple (Timothy Spall) is one of the delights of the film.
"Durward Lely's dad was the factor and housekeeper of this big estate just outside Arbroath owned by a rich landowner," says McKidd, who before filming spent months thoroughly researching his character in order to cope with Leigh's demanding improvisational methods. "One day the landowner heard him singing in church and sent him, as a young man, to Milan for eight years to learn to become an opera singer. He came back and had some success in London before joining the D'Oyly Carte company."
McKidd's research took him to Arbroath where he discovered a vault full of original letters which Durward Lely sent from Milan to his father and benefactor. "And there were his memoirs, which have never been published, sitting on a shelf of this mansion house which he was brought up in. It was just pure luck. I just went up there to look about and all this stuff turned up.
"I managed to track down one of his relations who is still alive. This woman was given this lucky charm when she was a little, little girl by Durward Lely when he was an old man. It was a little ivory horse that he wore around his neck whenever he was on stage. And she gave me that as a present because I was playing this part."
MIKE Leigh is full of praise for McKidd's research: "Kevin decided off his own bat to jump on a plane and go up to Arbroath. He went there and pottered around and said: 'I'm playing this guy called Durward Lely, is there anything on him?' and someone said: 'Actually, there's an unpublished autobiography in the drawer.' Your Gilbert and Sullivan freaks will be furious because they would pay huge amounts of money for something like that and there it was and nobody had ever heard of it."
McKidd's career is shifting up a gear and the same can be said of his personal life. His resume is packed with doomed lovers and his own relationships have been similarly fraught - "I've had some pretty complex ones along the way, some ups and downs and turbulence" - but is currently very happy. He got married in July last year to a girl who works in the box office of London's Royal Court Theatre. They met six months before that and McKidd proposed in January while he was in New York starring in an Almeida Theatre production of Racine's Brittanicus. He says that although he often still thinks of himself as very young, being married makes him feel more grown up: "You realise that you've got to work. It was okay not being able to have a mortgage when I was on my own, but I have a bit more responsibility now." But he admits to being slightly freaked out by the idea that any children they have are going to be English and jokes he'll have to give his "Cockney kid" Scottish voice-coaching.
ShareEmailDiggFacebookTwitterGoogleDeliciousStumbleUponNewsvineLinkedInMy YahooTechnoratiRedditPrintRecommend0For all the diversity of McKidd's work, he may be forever doomed to be known as that guy in Trainspotting who wasn't on the poster. He finds this irritating but also acknowledges it's pretty good shorthand for explaining who he is. "I met Tom Hanks yesterday," he says with an admirable lack of emphasis, "and he was like: 'Hey, I saw you in Topsy-Turvy, what else have you been in?' I told him I was in Trainspotting and when he asked what part I said: 'I was the guy who wasn't on the poster.' He was 'Oh sure! okay!'."
McKIDD was in talks with the Oscar-bagging actor about a part in Bandit Brothers, an American TV adaptation of Saving Private Ryan which Hanks will direct. It's a glamour job for sure, but McKidd's favourite role of his own remains Johnny, the cuckolded husband in The Soft Touch, one of The Acid House triptych of films. The Acid House was a flop, but McKidd's performance was extraordinary, providing a beating heart in a film which was otherwise pronounced dead on arrival.
"What I liked about it was that it was about a Scottish male lead who wasn't macho," he says. "There are a lot of Scottish characters written as cheeky chappies or hard men, but nothing's ever done about the thousands of guys who work in Safeways and what kind of life they have.
"I thought it was a really valid piece of work but it was slated. I think it was Loaded [he sneers out the title] who said that by the end of it you couldn't stand this character because he's such a f****** wimp that he deserved everything he got. But I don't think that was the point of the film at all. It was about a bloke who was brought up quite traditionally in Scotland and was basically born in the wrong place. Probably if he'd had a middle-class upbringing he'd have been very f****** brainy and doing great guns and having a great life. But he was just brought up on the wrong side of the f****** tracks."
If you think that this rant is a little overboard as a response to a critical drubbing, you should be aware that McKidd feels the material has personal resonance. "It's not like I had an abusive time when I was a kid," he says. "I had a great childhood but I always felt different. I was brought up on a council estate but I never felt that was where I was going to end up. But Johnny does end up there even though he knows he has the ability to get out, and he ends up getting f***** over because he is trying to be a good person."
There's a lot of passion and seriousness there. McKidd may shrug off praise and nonchalantly describe himself as a jobbing actor, but he is undeniably proud of his film, TV and stage work. "Yeah, I am," he admits. "By no means have I got connections in the right places. I'm not part of the Oxford crew like a lot of actors are, and I was never part of the Glasgow fraternity, that whole network there, because I'm from Elgin. I'm kind of doing it on my own.
"I'm proud that I was never sucked into those little clubs and cliques. There's been plenty of them along the way that I have witnessed and always kept away from. That's from my childhood as well. It's not that I was a loner, but I always kept to my own way."
Kevin McKidd, then. Whether playing a junkie, a leprechaun or a famous tenor, he's an actor you can always rely on to strike the right note.
Topsy-Turvy opens on Friday l Review, Pages 8 and 9 Born in Elgin in 1973, Kevin McKidd is a graduate of Queen Margaret College in Edinburgh. He earned his stripes in theatre, acting for the likes of Wildcat. However, his breakthrough came thanks to a double whammy of roles in Trainspotting and Small Faces. Topsy-Turvy is his latest film and he can be seen later this year in a Channel 4 adaptation of Anna Karenina
findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4156/is_20000213/ai_n13946281/?tag=content;col1