18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Robert Carlyle: Being a moustachioed Leith psychopath 'pays the rent'
But psychos, as he himself has put it, 'pay the rent'.
On camera at least, except when playing hash-smoking Highland policemen, he's typically tightly wound, clenched, intense.
Perhaps it's because he suffers the same dysphoria of nomenclature as do all Roberts. Intimately, he's known as Bobby, thus avoiding the depravity of Rab. Here, he shall be Robert, because it is a good and manly name, as stated on his tax returns and ordained by God on his birth certificate.
Robert is known for his dedicated preparation for each role, living rough before playing a homeless character in Antonia Bird's Safe, acquiring his Passenger-Carrying Vehicle Licence before playing a bus driver in Ken Loach's Carla's Song, and invading Poland before playing the lead character in miniseries Hitler: The Rise of Evil. He is widely thought to be the only Partick Thistle supporter to have played Hitler.
Robert Carlyle was born on 14 April 1961 in the bohemian Maryhill area of Glasgow. His early years were peripatetic, including time spent with his father in communes in Scotland, London and Brighton.
This unorthodox childhood had positive repercussions, with changing environments later aiding him in varied dramatic situations. Dad taking him to the pictures four or five times a week, watching cowboy films over and over again, probably helped too. Back in Glasgow, he disliked school, as do all sensitive and bright young people, and left at the age of 16, as everyone should. Without qualifications (later acquired at further education college), he worked for his father as a painter and decorator.
However, on his 21st birthday, he bought Arthur Miller's The Crucible with some book tokens and the idea of acting took root in his noggin.
NOSE HIS STUFF
HE became involved with an amateur company at the Glasgow Arts Centre, his first serious part being Rudolph, an alleged red-nosed reindeer.
Then came the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, which he disliked because, as he explained in 2016, 'most of the students were from down south and I didn't know how to deal with all of this. They were middle class.'
Everyone had to use Received Pronunciation.
'I remember one boy from Castlemilk coming in one day speaking like [Prince Charles] and I thought, 'What the f****?''Robert walked out at Christmas, only returning after repeated pleading by the principal, Ted Argent, who promised he wouldn't have to talk posh.
Not that he couldn't if he tried. He has after all talked Scouse and Eastern European to great acclaim. In 1991, Carlyle and four friends founded Raindog theatre company, which focused on playing Scots characters with real accents. That year, he appeared in The Bill, as has everyone, and starred in his first film, Riff-Raff, directed by realism-loving Ken Loach. Loach had been looking for actors who'd worked in construction, which Robert's painting career had encompassed.
His first high-profile role was in ITV's Cracker where, taking inspiration from Rab De Niro's Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, he played a survivor of the Hillsborough football disaster who embarks on a vengeful murder afterwards, in a complete change of pace, he landed the role of chilled out Highland copper Hamish Macbeth in the eponymous BBC series. Although he has said Cracker 'changed everything for me,' the years 1996 and 1967 brought the two roles that really catapulted him to fame: irksome thug Francis Begbie in bam-haunted Trainspotting and downtrodden former steel worker Gaz in male exploitation flick The Full Monty.
Robert has said of Begbie: 'I do love him. And Gaz. Both these characters have given me a tremendous career and a tremendous life.'
(Image: PA)
PREMIUM BOND
IN that career, he played Malachy McCourt in the 1999 film adaptation of Frank McCourt's memoir, Angela's Ashes, arch-villain Renard in Bond film The World Is Not Enough, and a cannibalistic soldier in …Ravenous. In 2007, he played one of the main characters in 28 Weeks Later and, in 2008, was cast as hunky scientist Dr. Nicholas Rush in television's Stargate Universe, set in ooter space.
Fantasy has never far off. In hit ABC show Once Upon a Time, he played a human-goblin hybrid called Rumplestiltskin. Goblin, aye.
He was also in Lord of the Ringsy Eragon, alongside John Malkovich and Jeremy Irons.
'I go into that world every so often, the big-budget world, and then I run away to get my head back together again."
In 2015, he directed The Legend of Barney Thomson, a black comedy and cinematic homage to Glasgow based on Doug Lindsay's novels and featuring Emma Thompson as Carlyle's foul-mouthed, chip-devouring mammy. In 2019, he portrayed Ogilvy in a BBC adaptation of The War of the Worlds while, in 2020, he starred as Robert Sutherland, the Conservative Prime Minister during a national crisis occasioned by a geomagnetic storm. Hardly typecasting, but as Carlyle has explained: '[T]hey wanted someone who was less obvious.'
More obvious is a reprise of Begbie for The Blade Artist, a miniseries currently in production. Off-screen, Robert keeps hype and social media at arm's length – '[M]y focus must always be the work itself' – and is not an avid reader, particularly when working: can only inhabit one world at a time.
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EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
IN 1999, he was Ordered into the British Empire and, despite global success, he's not attracted to Hollywood or the 'falseness' of chat shows. He splits his time between Vancouver and Glasgow, of which he says: 'I love this place, I'll always be back here.'
Family is everything and he's now happy as a homebody, telling the Observer in 2023: 'I've always been a bit of a loner.' Maybe not always. Everybody's a loner till some vacuous oaf shouts 'Party!'.
During the Cool Britannia era, Robert was invited to everything, hanging out with Oasis and Blur. 'It was incredibly hedonistic … There wasn't so much homebody then.'
Now, he's settled, contented, 'delighted with the career I have'.
In 2006, he said: 'I feel like I'm the luckiest man on the planet. If I can continue doing it for the next 25 years, I'll be more than happy." Just six years to go, mate.
