‘You should see some of the other scripts that come through’: Robert Carlyle interviewed

‘I always feel slightly sick when I hear actors talking politics,’ says Robert Carlyle — that polished Glaswegian burr sounding no less arresting over a slightly patchy Zoom connection. ‘I mean we’re all entitled to an opinion,’ he continues, sounding for a second as though he might be about to opt for a more diplomatic track. ‘I just find that too many actors find it difficult to get theirs across without sounding like a twat.’

It’s a fair point, you might think. But for Carlyle, it’s also been a good professional move. Reflecting on his career, he credits this aversion to mouthing off with inspiring his long-term commitment to keeping his head down. Not only, he says, has this helped him maintain the healthy mystique necessary for a serious actor, but it’s also stopped him from stumbling clumsily into public debates.

After three decades on screen, that would be an impressive feat for anyone. But particularly so for someone whose rise to fame coincided with the drug- and ego-fuelled Cool Britannia era (and who starred in two of its most iconic films,Trainspotting and The Full Monty), and whose solid proletarian credentials must have been sought by countless campaigns over the years.

His aversion to talking politics has been slightly complicated, though, by his latest posting: playing a (fictional) Consrvative prime minister in a high-budget disaster drama penned by one of the graduates of BBC1’s old spy thriller Spooks. All of a sudden, as he’s finding out in publicity interviews, you’re expected to have opinions on all sorts of things. The actual Prime Minister included.

You can understand his desire to stay above it all. You don’t have to watch more than five minutes of Cobra (whose second season is now airing on Sky) to realise that Carlyle’s PM has his mind on more important things, including — to name but a few — an impending cyber-war, the geopolitical strife from an oligarch’s assassination and a Beirut-grade explosion caused by a long-dormant second world war munitions ship found off the coast of Scotland (‘It probably won’t blow up,’ one character had predicted, with the kind of portentous optimism typically found in the opening minutes of Casualty).