OUTLANDER STAR RICHARD RANKIN ON GLOBAL FAME ANDAGLASGOW CHILDHOOD

RICHARD RANKIN does a rapid-fire line in witty anecdotes. When we meet at the Soho Hotel in London, the Glasgow-born star of hit US television drama Outlander is in gregarious mood. There is a mischievous twinkle in his eye and it doesn’t take long for us to go roaring off-piste.

First, though, there’s his role in Outlander to chat about. Richard plays Roger Wakefield, an Oxford professor and the adopted son of an Inverness minister, who finds himself unwittingly embroiled in a time-travelling adventure.

Based on the bestselling books of Diana Gabaldon, the TV show has garnered millions of fans and made its cast into household names around the world. The third series, shot largely around Scotland, will air on Amazon Prime Video from next Monday.

Richard joined the cast in late 2015 after almost 18 months of feverish speculation. Other names in the frame to play Roger reportedly included Downton Abbey’s Matthew Goode and former Game of Thrones stars Gethin Anthony and Richard Madden.

“Casting was thorough to say the least,” says Richard. “It is the most thorough casting I have done on anything. They had me in time and again with different material and ideas for the character. They were very clear about what they wanted.”

From the outset Richard, 34, was a firm favourite among many Outlander aficionados who lobbied passionately for him to get the role.

“Even from before I was cast I was one of their choices as Roger for a long time,” he says. “That was bizarre and put me in a very strange position where I thought: ‘I hope the execs on this show don’t think I have started my own campaign to be cast …’”

The second eldest of four sons, Richard grew up in Glasgow. His father Colin, now retired, was a police officer while his mother Margaret continues to work in the hotel industry.

Richard spent his early childhood in the west end, where the family had a flat on Byres Road, before moving to King’s Park on the south side (not Rutherglen as Wikipedia states) when he was 10.

His parents had their work cut out. “It was chaos with four boys in the house,” he says. “I was always running away when I was younger. I was brought home by my dad’s colleagues a couple of times for running off on mad adventures.”

As we probe deeper into his past, there are moments where it feels like I’m playing amateur psychologist. Why did he run away? Was it about attention? Did he do it because he was bored?

“I think I was just adventurous,” he shrugs. “Whenever there was any scaffolding up you could often find me at the top of it – or on tenement roofs. I would climb anything.”

He has loads of stories in this vein, although Richard is adamant that there was no malevolent or troubling underlying reason for his high jinks. “It wasn’t because family life was bad or anything,” he asserts. “I was a handful. I was utter mischief when I was younger.”

While Richard wouldn’t begin acting until his 20s, there were signs of a budding performer long before that. “My earliest memory of music was listening to Billy Joel. I have many vivid memories of me dancing around in a nappy singing Uptown Girl.”

As a youngster Richard went through a phase of pretending to be RoboCop, while other gems included doing a Michael Jackson impersonation concert in the school playground.

“I had bought smoke bombs,” he says. “I’m not quite sure how I thought logistically I was going to have all these pyrotechnics going off. But obviously in a young boy’s head there is lights, smoke and a full concert atmosphere.

“I managed to sell three tickets. It turned out an utter disaster and I split my head open trying to do a backflip off a pillar as my finale. The smoke bombs didn’t work either.”

Throughout his teens Richard continued to daydream about stardom. He began a course in IT at Glasgow