'The Scot Pack' Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book 'The Scot Pack' by Brian Pendreigh
copyrighted Brian Pendreigh, 2000.
The text below is a transcription (by 'Ravenlilith' and Deejay)
from pages 156 through 162 and is in direct reference to Mr. Angus Macfadyen.

...If an actor is the parts he plays then Angus Macfadyen would not only be acclaimed as a cinematic genius, but would have been crowned King of Scotland by now. Macfadyen has a unique talent, seemingly fuelled by a self-belief that does not so much border on arrogance as trample all over it with tackety boots and leave it gasping for breath. When Mel Gibson was casting 'Braveheart', Angus Macfadyen was invited to audition for the role of the effeminate English prince, Edward. Macfadyen had no feature film experience, though he had played a gay man in the BBC 2 drama 'The Lost Language of Cranes'. But he did not want to get typecast. And, as a Scot, he was none too keen on playing an English prince in such an important film about Scottish history, regardless of the prince's sexual orientation. "I drank two bottles of red wine," says Macfadyen. "And I went and courageously put my foot down and said, 'Robert the Bruce- c'est moi.'" It mattered little that the part had already been offered to someone else. "I had been told not to even bother thinking about Robert the Bruce," says Macfadyen. Nevertheless, he spent an hour and a half explaining to Gibson why he should be Bruce. "A week later the part was mine."
Macfadyen was never one to settle for a prince's crown when there was the chance of a kingdom. He has subsequently played Richard Burton, that most mellifluous of Welsh actors, Peter Lawford, the English film star who married John Kennedy's sister and became one of Sinatra's closest friends in the (in)famous Rat Pack, and, in Tim Robbin's 'Cradle Will Rock', he was Orson Welles, who made 'Citizen Kane' at 25 but was reduced to appearing in 'Muppet' films and sherry adverts in his later years. And like Welles, Macfadyen's career has had its ups and downs. He has appeared in some decidedly dodgy projects, too. In 'Braveheart' he played Robert the Bruce to Mel Gibson's William Wallace; in 'Warriors of Virtue' he played warlord Komodo to a bunch of kung fu-fighting kangaroos. And the marsupials were considered more convincing. "Macfadyen chews scenery as the villain, acting like the errant offspring of Ming the Merciless and Little Richard," wrote the American critic Leonard Maltin.
Playing Robert the Bruce, in a film that went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture of 1995, was a phenomenal break for an actor who had never made a film before and who was approaching his thirty-first birthday when the film went into production at the foot of Ben Nevis in June 1994. Previously Macfadyen's best-known role had been that of fiancé to Catherine Zeta-Jones, the Welsh actress who burst onto the scene in the ITV comedy series 'The Darling Buds of May' and survived her appearances in some awful English films to become a major Hollywood star in the 'Mask of Zorro' and 'Entrapment'.
Like Dougray Scott, Macfadyen had been a regular in the military soap 'Soldier Soldier' in the early 90's. "For most actors in Britain, a steady television job is about as good as it gets," he says. "I'm not putting anyone I worked with down, but for me 'Soldier Soldier' was a stepping stone to better things." He says he made "ridiculous" wage demands for a third series of 'Soldier Soldier', knowing they would probably not be met. He was unemployed for seven months before appearing as a schizophrenic in the BBC Scotland series 'Takin' Over the Asylum'. His confidence was at an all-time low because of repeated rejections, he says. He kept blowing auditions because he was feeling so desperate, and the more parts he lost the more desperate he became. A vicious circle. And then he went alone and met Mel Gibson and told him he did not want to play Prince Edward because he was born to play King Robert the Bruce. And Gibson bought it.
Gibson indulged Macfadyen on the set of 'Braveheart'. In one scene Bruce is meant to be pacing the floor impatiently, waiting for Wallace, but Macfadyen had other ideas and he was not slow to tell Gibson just how he thought the scene should play. "I said, 'I've been waiting for a few hours for you, haven't I? Like half a day?' and he said, 'Yeah.' 'And I've been going a little bit crazy, haven't I?' - 'Yeah' - 'So this is my table, isn't it?' - 'Yeah' - 'So I'm just going to walk up and down on the table, if that's alright'... A lot of directors, to something like that, would go, 'Oh, no, no, no, you can't have that kind of stuff.' They wouldn't understand how you can get to that place as an actor."
Macfadyen was not the most popular actor on the 'Braveheart' set. He had little in common with the cast who came predominantly from working-class West of Scotland and Irish backgrounds. Some considered him the sort of person who would walk up and down a table just for effect. Macfadyen comes from Edinburgh. His father worked as a doctor for the World Health Organisation and had a series of international postings. Macfadyen was educated not in Easterhouse's school of hard knocks, but in France and Copenhagen, where he gained an international baccalaureate. He took an honours degree in French and English at Edinburgh University, during which time he developed his love for drama. "I got involved with every aspect of it, from the lighting to designing the sets and cleaning the toilets. It was clear to me I had discovered my destiny." He trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, but left early after being offered the role in 'The Lost Language of Cranes'. He was also a talented writer, winning a student playwright's award in 1991 for his play '1905'.
It was the difference in Macfadyen, the difference in his performance, that made Robert the Bruce such an effective and successful characterisation in 'Braveheart'. Macfadyen has never quite received the credit he deserved for this remarkable achievement, even in his native Scotland, where his name remained virtually unknown. His mannered performance as a man wrestling with inner demons contrasted wonderfully with Gibson's reading of Wallace as someone who acts, and reacts, on instinct and impulse. The killing of Wallace's wife forces Wallace onto a path of violent retribution, and, having chosen that course, he pursues it single-mindedly until his capture and execution. Bruce is a weaker, or perhaps simply a more complex, man, chopping and changing sides on several occasions. "He's a very confused character," says Macfadyen. "Heroes are usually presented as very passive characters who are almost superhuman. And, in this situation, it was like you had the birth of somebody, from very sort of meek, mild origins, who had to overcome certain obstacles, and I suppose personal weaknesses, in order to become the hero which he was destined to become." Bruce hardly seems National Hero material at the outset. But he is left on the battlefield at Bannockburn, leading the Scottish army, when Wallace is dead. The English expect him to pay homage to the English crown, the Scots expect him to do it, perhaps even Bruce expects to do it. But he turns to his troops and slowly, dispassionately, tells them, "You have bled with Wallace… now bleed with me." It is not just one of this film's great moments, it is one of film's great moments. The worm of history has turned and 'Braveheart' ends with the Scots charging the English. The rest, is, as they say, history. Macfadyen led the charge, Scotland voted for home rule, and within five years of the film's premiere Scotland had its own parliament once more. Free-dom.
Not that Macfadyen was there to see it. He could not wait to clear off to Hollywood. "When Mel called to tell me I had the part, I got on the next plane to L.A. to find an agent and a place to stay," he said in an interview in Los Angeles a few years later. "I knew it was my big break, my passport out of the miserable existence I had known in London. When we wrapped I came straight here. This is my new home. This is where the opportunities are."
He was back in the British Isles at the time of 'Braveheart's British premiere in September 1995 making 'The Brylcreem Boys' with John Gordon Sinclair. In 'Braveheart' Ireland stood in for Scotland; in 'The Brylcreem Boys' the Isle of Man stood in for Ireland. Southern Ireland was neutral during the Second World War and, in the spirit of neutrality, British and German servicemen who washed up or crash-landed on Irish shores were held as POWs. The camps had fairly relaxed regimes and prisoners were even allowed out on day passes. It was an intriguing historical siding, but the film botched it by trying to shape it as a romance, in which Macfadyen was a German pilot pursuing the same girl as the American pilot he had shot down. The girl in question is Jean Butler. She was the star of 'Riverdance', and the film-makers could not resist throwing in a gratuitous dance number in the local pub. As the leather-jacketted Rudolph von Stegenbeck, Macfadyen looks like a rather podgy teddy boy. He plays the part as if he were appearing in an episode of that dreadful English sitcom ''Allo, 'Allo'. The film got a belated, if limited, cinema release in 1999 and fell to earth with a thud.
Macfadyen was quoted in the People newspaper in September 1995 complaining about 'sexual exploitation' of actors. He was quoted as Zeta-Jones's 'husband-to-be,' saying she had turned down a series of roles because they involved sex and/or nudity. More controversially, he seemed to suggest some sex scenes were shot just for the private enjoyment of film crews. He said a seven-minute nude gay scene he did for 'The Lost Language of Cranes' was edited down to a few seconds, but that one of the director's friends subsequently told him, "We have all that footage back home. We've been getting our rocks off to it." Unfortunately the director Nigel Finch was unable to exercise his right of reply as he had recently died of AIDS. Suffice it to say, the story did not endear Macfadyen to some sections of the British film industry.
He ruffled a few more feathers after landing the lead role of the evil prince Komodo in the fantasy-adventure 'Warriors of Virtue', which took him off to Chine for four months. He had been told to lose ten pounds in weight before filming began. When he turned up for filming he had actually put on another five, and tight-fitting costumes had to be redesigned. "I love eating and I hate working out," he explained matter-of-factly. The film-makers were none to impressed by his attempts at martial arts either, and in truth it is hard to imagine a less likely action hero - Ewen Bremner, perhaps. Instead of working out and losing weight, Macfadyen showed his commitment to the film by improving the script and giving it more humour. "I liked the concept of the film," he says, "but I wanted to rewrite my dialogue." Macfadyen saw himself turned into an action doll and complained that it did not look like him and that he was not getting any of the merchandising revenue, but 'Warriors of Virtue' was not exactly 'Star Wars' anyway.
Macfadyen struggled to make his mark in Hollywood, appearing in obscure movies, such as 'Snide and Prejudice', in which he was a mad killer who thinks he is Hitler, and television dramas, including a mini-series about Elizabeth Taylor in which he played Richard Burton. "It's frustrating," says Macfadyen. "When you know you're good for a role and you read it's gone to someone like Matt Dillon, that's too much. It can be crushing." It must have been particularly galling that the career of his former fiancé Catherine Zeta-Jones was beginning to take off at this time. Macfadyen was now living in a rented house in the Hollywood Hills with another actress, Claudia Christian, who played Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova in the Channel 4 sci-fi series 'Babylon 5'.
'The Rat Pack' was a movie made specifically for American cable television, but it had a much higher profile than most TV movies, partly because of its subject matter and partly because of its high-quality cast. Macfadyen found himself in exalted company, with Joe Mantegna ('House of Games', 'The Godfather Part III') as Dean Martin, Don Cheadle ('Devil in a Blue Dress', 'Boogie Nights') as Sammy Davis Jr. and Ray Liotta ('Field of Dreams', 'Goodfellas') as Frank Sinatra, pandering to both the Mafia and the Kennedys. Lawford, who appeared in a series of films including 'Easter Parade' and 'Little Women', played an instrumental role in facilitating the affair between Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. Macfadyen portrayed him as a talentless alcoholic, who was tolerated for his connections, and Lawford's son Christopher was among the relatives of the various stars who attacked the film in the press. Macfadyen met Lawford's former wife, Patricia Kennedy-Lawford, at a function. "When I first saw her I sort of held myself back, just waiting for the slap," he says. "She had seen an advance copy of the tape and I think it's fair to say she wasn't best pleased. She said the guys, Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Dean Martin and Lawford, were much nicer in real life than how they were portrayed in the film."
'The Rat Pack' reignited Macfadyen's career and he followed it with 'Cradle Will Rock', which took its title from one of Welles's theatrical triumphs, before he took Hollywood by storm with 'Kane'. He had just turned 22 when he staged Marc Blitzstein's radical pro-labour opera 'The Cradle Will Rock' in 1937. It was produced under the U.S. Government's Federal Theatre Project, but, with the country in the grip of industrial unrest, nervous politicians banned it. Locked out of their original theatre, Welles marched cast and audience twenty-one blocks to an alternative venue. Faced with union rules that prohibited the actors from appearing on stage, he had the cast sit in the audience and deliver their lines from there.
Robbins' film uses Welles and his play as the centrepiece of a wider, Altmanesque tableau of the exciting and turbulent times in American culture, and Macfadyen found himself rubbing shoulders with Emily Watson, Susan Sarandon, Bill Murray, John Cusack and Vanessa Redgrave. Macfadyen played Welles as an obnoxious, arrogant drunk, ensuring further controversy in the press, but at least, unlike Lawford, no one could accuse Welles of being talentless. 'Cradle Will Rock' premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1999, where excerpts from Macfadyen's next film, 'Titus', a $20 million adaptation of Shakespeare's play, were shown to the press and distributors. Eagerly anticipated, it was directed by Julie Taymor, who had adapted 'The Lion King' for Broadway, and co-starred Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, and Scots Laura Fraser and Alan Cumming. It proved stylish and very violent.
By the end of the year, when 'Cradle Will Rock' came out in America, just in time to qualify for Oscar consideration, Macfadyen was being pictured alongside of Hollywood's most respected stars in the likes of Premier and Vanity Fair magazines. This was the guy whose post-'Braveheart' highlight had been playing an overweight baddie in a fantasy about kung fu kangaroos. Now he was Orson Welles. Macfadyen felt well placed to empathise with the great man, following his own knock-backs in Hollywood. "I know how he felt," he says. "You have to be your own man…Welles was such a renegade that Hollywood turned its back on him, but he was his own man. He wouldn't lick people's arses." You cannot write Macfadyen off. He may well be the most arrogant actor Scotland has produced in recent times. Yet, behind the arrogance, you occasionally see glimpses of uncertainty. It is that combination of arrogance and uncertainty that makes Macfadyen such a rare and precious actor, an actor ideally qualified to play madmen and kings, geniuses and men who must overcome personal weaknesses in order to become the heroes they are destined to become.

END EXCERPT
To Articles