Rome leads to roles
REMEMBER the 1996 British flick Trainspotting? Kevin McKidd, who began his career on stage with the play The Silver Darlings, really got noticed in his film debut role as the ill-fated drug addict, Tommy. He nabbed the role when he was 21, fresh out of acting school.
“I’m just a wee boy in Trainspotting. Who’s that guy? The guy with the dodgy haircut,” he muses.
Like the rest of the cast, he didn’t expect Trainspotting to become such a success. But after the film’s international acclaim, he was offered roles in many indie films such as the werewolf drama and cult favourite Dog Soldiers (2002). He also nearly ended up in the zombie movie 28 Days (2000) but didn’t sign up due to a packed schedule.
It was Rome, however, that made McKidd the darling of television – especially American television.
“It has done nothing for my career,” he says. Then, he pauses and laughs.
“No, of late, it has been easier for me to get into the rooms I could never get into and meet the people I couldn’t meet. But in the end you still have to audition. It’s not as if you’ve got a golden spoon just because you were in Rome. But people respected what we did,” reveals McKidd, who recently appeared as mercenary Petras Kolnas in the movie Hannibal Rising.
In fact, after Rome’s second and final season, McKidd was identified for numerous American television pilots. He did finally choose the role of a San Francisco journalist who time-travels in the drama Journeyman. The show is waiting to be picked up by US network NBC. And although McKidd insists that there’s no golden spoon, his Rome co-star Ray Stevenson is in a CBS pilot, a police drama called Babylon Fields.
Meanwhile, McKidd is hailed as one of the many British actors who have successfully invaded American television of late.
But to McKidd, it’s his hope that he can one day star in a “gnarly, gritty, dirty Scottish movie version of Macbeth.”
“We’ll shoot it on the wide open beaches in the north of Scotland where I’m from ... I’d love to do that,” he concludes.
