MEET THE B-MOVIE MEGASTAR
He’s the most successful Scots actor you may never have heard of — and has forged a career alongside the biggest names in Hollywood
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N his native Scotland work may not be pouring in, exactly, for jobbing actor Gianni Capaldi. There was a recent blink and you’ll miss it appearance as a mobile phone salesman in sitcom Still Game.
He was briefly on screen as a bounty hunter in the 2019 film Robert the Bruce. A part in a BBC comedy short starring comedian Frankie Boyle came up a few years ago...
It is some comfort, then, that the employment situation looks rather rosier in the United States. Over the past decade, the 44year-old has appeared in several dozen American films alongside some of the biggest names in Hollywood.
He has done fantasy, horror, sci-fi, action, crime, comedy – and this year even made his first Western alongside US movie legend Ron Perlman. Other big names he has appeared with in a packed shooting schedule include Morgan Freeman, Danny Glover, Lindsay Lohan, John Cusack, Billy Zane and Dolph Lundgren.
And just the night before we are due to meet he takes a phone call about a future project with Nicholas Cage.
Such is his growing list of credits in Hollywood that Capaldi is fast becoming the most successful Scottish actor you have probably never heard of.
‘I wish I could work a lot more here because then I could be with my family,’ says Capaldi from Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, who is a second cousin of Glasgow-born actor Peter Capaldi though the two have never met.
‘My mother and my grandparents are here and it’s great to get back to see them but the bulk of my work is in America.’ This has its compensations. Home for the former St Mary’s Primary School and Hamilton College pupil is a large house with a swimming pool in Las Vegas, a short drive from his close friend actor Martin Compston’s pad.
They meet at one or other of their homes to watch Celtic matches on TV.
CAPALDI also owns a three-bedroom property in West Hollywood and a pied à terre in Hamilton where he and his American wife Amanda are currently staying until their second child, expected next month, is born. All in all, not a bad set-up for an only child who caught the acting bug only upon realising that his dream of becoming a professional footballer had slipped out of reach.
And, if the 44-year-old is a bigger noise in the States than in the land of his birth, it is surely because he planned his career that way. After several years in the bar trade in Hamilton, Capaldi lit out for the US almost two decades ago to study at the Stella Adler Academy of Acting in Los Angeles.
‘In Scotland there was hardly any work,’ he explains. ‘You would have to be in London, so I thought if I had to go to London, shouldn’t I just take the plunge and go over to L.A.? I didn’t know anyone over there, to be honest with you. I didn’t have a clue where I was going.
‘I just knew which acting school I should be at and that was that. I thought to myself “I’ll give L.A. a chance and I did.”’ There was a degree of scepticism, he remembers, among friends and family in his home town.
‘They thought I was crazy,’ he laughs. ‘It was like, “he’ll be back in a year or six months or something. The prodigal son will return”, but it’s been 18 years now and it’s still going strong.’
Things did start to happen for the confident young Scot pretty quickly in L.A., but not in the way he expected. While still at acting school, he found himself drawn into the city’s bar and club industry.
Capaldi, whose family are long established in the hotel and bar trade in South Lanarkshire, was soon one of the key players in an Irish bar and a hip Hollywood club called Madame Royale which was a favourite with stars such as Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera.
However, his embryonic acting career was almost completely obscured by his burgeoning business interests.
‘I stopped pursuing acting,’ admitted Capaldi at the time. But the lure of the film industry ultimately proved too great – even if the films themselves were not always masterpieces.
His big break came in the straight-to-video fantasy/action romp Cross, where Capaldi plays a London gangster called English in a story about a megalomaniac bent on world domination. Former footballer Vinnie Jones appears in the film as a Viking.
Finding himself in the company of established American stars such as Michael Clarke Duncan and Brian Austin Green, Capaldi admitted he was ‘for the first time, a bit star struck’.
‘But I started talking to Vinnie Jones who didn’t talk to anybody else, kind of thing. We started chatting about football so it was a kind of common denominator and then we became pals after that. That took the edge off it.’
The resulting movie may not have impressed many serious film critics, but Capaldi felt he was on his way.
‘From there on it’s like a snowball effect, I feel. Work gets work and dry spells get nothing.’ Thus a string of action roles followed.
Hard Rush saw Capaldi play a
Scottish hoodlum in the Los Angeles drug world; in Among the Shadows he was a police lieutenant in a werewolf thriller and in River Runs Red, which features John Cusack, he plays a racist cop who mistakenly shoots dead an unarmed black man.
hE says: ‘I was really happy with that. I was the main villain. I’d never done extra work and suddenly you’re integral to the story and you’re working with the likes of John Cusack. You do take a step back and go, “Wow!”’
He is proudest of all, perhaps, of his work in his latest film, Hell on the Border, starring Sons of Anarchy’s Perlman and Frank Grillo, the true story of how the first African American US Marshal in the old west earns his spurs.
Capaldi plays Tom Pinkerton, son of Glasgow-born Allan Pinkerton who founded the legendary US detective agency.
‘It was great because I got to play Scottish – although when I turned up with my Scots accent on set the director said, “we’ll maybe have to adjust this a bit”. He says “how can we get just a little American in it?” He was worried no one would understand.’
Having been pulled up for sounding too Scottish in his portrayal of a fellow Scotsman, it’s little wonder perhaps that Capaldi is beginning to eye the drama scene on this side of the Atlantic ever more covetously.
Especially when his good friend and Las Vegas neighbour Martin Compston appears to have struck gold with a starring role in the British drama serial Line of Duty and a steady stream of film work.
‘He’s done brilliantly,’ says Capaldi. ‘He’s moved up to another level.’
The pair first met in Los Angeles a decade ago through Scottish actor Tony Curran, with whom the then virtually unknown Compston used to stay when he was in L.A.
‘I felt bad for him because Tony would sometimes say he couldn’t stay there,’ says Capaldi. ‘So I was like, “come and stay with me”. I had a three bedroom house in West Hollywood at the time and I had a spare room anyway.
‘It was nice because when I met Martin it was like home from home; we would run about and talk about Scotland.’
Although they had never met in their homeland, it turned out Capaldi and Compston had much in common. Both were nearly men in Scottish professional football, Compston having made a couple of first team appearances for Greenock Morton.
Both were passionate fans of Celtic. And of course both were struggling Scottish actors a long way from home.
Since they became close friends the parallels have become yet more striking. Both have married American women, both of whom used to be American football cheerleaders – and both families are now based in Las Vegas. Why did Capaldi move there? ‘You can thank Martin Compston for that one,’ he says.
THERE follows a comical tale in which Compston hits on the idea of moving to Las Vegas and persuades his friend to go househunting there with him. Within hours, both have already put in offers for properties.
‘The trouble was his fell through while mine got accepted,’ laughs Capaldi. ‘Then he put an offer in on another one and he didn’t get it. By then his wife was saying to him, “you know, maybe we should hold off” but Martin was saying, “I can’t, Gianni’s just bought a house there and I persuaded him to do it, so we can’t now say we’re not moving to Vegas.”’
Ultimately both found homes there and, for the past couple of years, have enjoyed idyllic lifestyles there when they are not away filming.
‘It’s just a different life,’ says Capaldi. ‘It’s sunny, you can have a barbecue every night, sit outside, go for chicken wings together. Watching Celtic there is a little less lonely too when you have another mad-keen fan of the Parkhead club on your doorstep.
‘I think the last Celtic-Rangers game was four in the morning for us because it was a noon kick off here,’ says Capaldi.
‘We said let’s meet at midnight at the Red Rock Casino, have a couple of drinks, nothing crazy, then go back to the house about three, watch the build-up and watch the game on Celtic TV.’
Compston was one of the best men at his wedding to Californian Amanda Fitz in 2015 and it was alongside Compston that Capaldi made his brief appearance in Still Game.
He says of his friend: ‘I think sometimes we kind of rely on each other. Even though we’ve got our wives’ families nearby... I still think it’s like that one comfort zone that we have each other out in that desert. I can’t speak for him but I’d definitely be sad to see him go.’
For now, however, it is Capaldi who is back in Scotland and, by the sound of it, wishing he could spend more time here.
Having seen to it that his first daughter Trinity, two, was born in his native land, he is committed to ensuring that his next – due in three weeks – can say the same.
Almost two decades into his American adventure the lustre of LA – still the centre of his working life – has begun to wane, as has the merry-go-round of auditions and attendant disappointments.
The move to Las Vegas, he says, was as much about protecting his sanity as it was about finding an affordable dream home.
In Tinseltown, he says, the restaurants are more interested in pandering to the needs of designer dogs than children. Nowhere on earth, he admits, has he encountered the falseness and insincerity which pervades Los Angeles life.
And so, sitting in the Avonbridge Hotel in Hamilton which his family owns, Capaldi cuts a restless figure – hungry for a bigger slice of the action he has carved out for himself in the US, yes – but hungrier still, perhaps, to make his remarkable success story count over here.