Why Kelly’s taking a break after the onset of ‘acting middle age’
After a string of hit movies and TV series, Scots star is focusing on her family over film roles
SHE was sitting in the second row of the audition hall when Danny Boyle first fixed his gaze on her and, instinctively, she looked away. That could have been a mistake.
A trained actress might have locked eyes with the film director, but Kelly Macdonald was not one of those. She was, at the time, a bashful barmaid with a dream.
Yet, as Boyle remembered it, as soon as the 18-year-old sat down in front of him for her interview, he knew he had his ‘Diane’.
His casting for the role of the schoolgirl temptress in Trainspotting was, of course, inspired – and life-changing for the unworldly young woman who landed the part.
For almost a quarter of a century now, the novice who attended the audition at Strathclyde University on a whim has been in more or less constant demand for the mysterious combination of strength and vulnerability that she brings to the screen.
She has worked with some of the biggest names in the film industry – Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, Robert Altman – and has appeared alongside some of its most admired stars, including Steve Buscemi, Josh Brolin and Benedict Cumberbatch.
So successful was her career, in fact, that it is arguable that when Boyle reassembled the Trainspotting cast for a sequel in 2016, Macdonald was the one least in need of the work. But, three years after revisiting the character that kickstarted her acting dreams, could it be that the first clouds are appearing on her career’s horizon?
‘I’m not actually working right now,’ the Glasgow-based actress told the Radio Times this week in an interview to promote a new television drama, Giri/Haji. ‘I was pretty back-to-back for a while there,’ she added. ‘Now I’m resting.’
Macdonald also candidly admitted that she was not committed to any other projects ‘because I’m not being offered anything’.
Strange as it may seem for an Emmywinning Scottish actress feted across the US for her leading role in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, Macdonald’s diary sounds disconcertingly empty as she arrives at the onset of acting ‘middle age’.
Now 43 and a mother of two young boys, the once charmed life of the in-demand film actress has not been without its challenges lately.
In 2017, she split from her husband of 14 years, Dougie Payne, bassist with Scots band Travis. With both children at school, her options for accepting work overseas are suddenly limited.
‘I can’t commit to a big Boardwalk-type thing any more,’ she said. ‘Well, not for a while.’ If that ‘while’ is the remainder of her younger son’s school years, then it will last at least another decade. What might the glittering career of one of Scotland’s most engaging stars look like by then?
Not that Macdonald ever truly considered herself a star, of course. On her modest recounting of it, she has rarely had starring roles and has most often been cast as a domestic servant. Even when she does a big film, she says, ‘it’s still a lesser big film than the really big films’.
As for the Hollywood earnings many suppose have surely come her way, she once revealed that her wage for appearing in the critically acclaimed Coen brothers film No Country For Old Men was only enough to buy her a pair of cowboy boots.
Mind you, ‘they were really great cowboy boots’, she added. ‘I mean, I don’t want to complain.’
Then there are Macdonald’s views on nude scenes – views which somehow underline the passage of time since the ardent bedroom scene in Train-spotting with Ewan McGregor where, within seconds of kissing, neither was wearing a stitch. She later said she did not even remember being asked to do that scene.
‘I’m just getting to the age where... I used to not care about getting my photos taken, or any of that nudity thing,’ she told the Radio Times. ‘You’d expect that the more you did them the easier they’d get. But that’s not my experience.’
BY the time she appeared in Boardwalk Empire, she said, she insisted on a body double on the one occasion she was asked to undress and ‘was such a pain in the a**e about it’ that ‘they didn’t ask me again’.
It all leaves Macdonald looking a rather more complex and careworn figure than she would have appeared to Danny Boyle back in that 1995 audition in Glasgow.
Casting directors, perhaps, have noticed. Recent outings have included TV film The Child in Time, in which she and Benedict Cumberbatch play the parents of a missing child, and four-part BBC drama The Victim, in which she appears as the mother of a son murdered in circumstances evocative of the death of Jamie Bulger.
In the eight-part Giri/Haji, meanwhile, she is a troubled cop with an unfulfilled personal life.
Little wonder she is getting used to showcasing what she self-deprecatingly calls ‘Kelly’s ugly crying face’.
It is all a far cry from wise-beforeher-years Diane, who succeeded so effortlessly in making the heroinaddicted twentysomethings of Trainspotting look stagnant and out of touch. That, of course, may have had something to do with the state of her fellow actors when they turned up for their scenes.
‘Never mind hangovers on set, people were still drunk,’ she recalled.
But while the young Diane may have come across as confident and carefree, the truth is the actress playing her was anything but. Between scenes she spent much of her time hiding in the toilet.
Inevitably, she felt out of her depth appearing alongside established talents such as McGregor and Robert Carlyle.
In contrast to their drama school backgrounds, Macdonald had left school at 16 and had done little more in the way of work than serving drinks in a bar.
She was brought up in Glasgow’s South Side until she was nine, when her father Archie, a painter and decorator, left. Her mother, Patsy, then raised Kelly and her brother, David, on her own in social housing in the suburbs.
‘I can only imagine the courage that took,’ Macdonald said later.
In her bedroom, the schoolgirl would dabble with a tape recorder, reading plays and practising accents – to this day her mastery of those is among the most impressive of her talents.
As for her lucky break, that may have had more to do with the look she was sporting at the time.
She said: ‘I’d just had my hair cut really short and weird, whereas all the other girls had long hair.
‘They were all in pretty dresses, I was in a jumper I got from Oxfam, ripped jeans and a big pair of clumpy steel-toe-capped shoes. In the end it probably worked in my favour.’
Swept along by the wave of opportunities which followed the release of Trainspotting, Macdonald moved to London, where she met her future husband – discovering that, as children, they had lived only a few streets away from each other.
A string of film credits followed, including Gosford Park – one of several ‘below stairs’ roles for the actress who seemed to have an easy affinity with the well-meaning but nervy mind-set of the maidservant.
‘My gran was a cleaner and so I’m following in the family tradition,’ Macdonald once joked. ‘I very rarely get to play glamorous parts.’
A recent exception was her portrayal of a young Princess Margaret in this year’s Sky Arts comedy Urban Myths. But acquiescent characters with a surprising inner strength seem more her stock in trade.
As Marc Turtletaub, who directed her in the 2018 film Puzzle, put it, she is a ‘genius actor’.
He added: ‘There is a nuance in her performances, a vulnerability in who she is and a bit of reserve.’
Her Emmy came from The Girl in the Café, a 2005 made-for-television romantic drama written by Richard Curtis and co-starring Bill Nighy.
Macdonald’s character ends up berating the prime minister over Third World debt. That put her on the radar of the Coen brothers, who cast her as South Texan Carla Jean
Moss in No Country For Old Men, which almost certainly caught Martin Scorsese’s eye when it came to casting for Boardwalk Empire, HBO’s big budget portrait of Prohibition-era Atlantic City.
Playing Margaret Schroeder, wife of the central character, corrupt city father Nucky Thompson, she was a leading player in all five series of the wildly successful show, receiving a slew of award nominations.
She and Payne moved from London to New York, where they lived in a stylish apartment in Manhattan’s East Village.
But Macdonald surely knew that her days as a free agent actor – able to up sticks and move from city to city as the work demanded – were numbered.
The pair sold up in 2016 and returned to Glasgow, where their children now attend school.
Initially she was thrilled to be home and living in the city’s West End – the first place she had a flat after leaving the family home some 25 years earlier.
She once said of living in Manhattan: ‘I adore the fact that when I’m driving home from work, as soon as I hit my neighbourhood, I see people I know.
‘It’s such a great community. It’s like being in a village in Scotland.’
On being an actor and a parent, she lamented recently: ‘It’s really hard. The travelling is difficult. When I work, it’s generally not in Glasgow, which in a way is good because you can focus on the job.
MACdONALd insists that ‘any actress I know who is a mother never feels she is getting it right’, adding: ‘You feel that you’re not doing either job very well – mothering or acting. I just take it as it comes.
‘Four weeks away is just about OK. But for some reason it’s very different for men, you know? It just is. If I was Ewan McGregor sitting here, you wouldn’t bring it up.’
It was in the aftermath of their return to Glasgow that Macdonald and Payne separated, bringing the curtain down on what had seemed to be a blissfully happy marriage.
Neither have discussed the reasons for their split.
And so Macdonald finds herself at the tail end of her career’s first flush – all 24 years of it – which took her from Glasgow to London to New York and to successes surely beyond her wildest imaginings.
Yet, back in the city of her birth, there is an air of uncertainty about what comes next.
One of her latest roles was that of Georgie in the still unreleased dirt Music. The two-month shoot, she said, was almost a job too far. Although her sons were able to visit her, she said: ‘Afterwards, I thought, I can’t do that again.’
Clearly, Macdonald’s priorities have changed and while once she was saying yes to projects, now ‘for sure’ she is saying no to some.
It is the mark of a down-to-earth actress who, clearly, knows her own mind, cares little for the trappings of fame and asserts her will rather more forcefully than the teenager who once hid in the toilets.
Yet there is something wholly unexpected about Macdonald’s admission that she is ‘not being offered anything’ in the way of acting work.
Her talents are too rare, surely, to be resting for long.