The Artful Dodger Avoids the Pigeonholes

It is testimony to actor Robert Carlyle’s chameleon-like quality that he’s allowed in New York’s Parker Meridian bar. It’s a sedate, civilized place. In fact, not only is he allowed in here, he’s allowed to stay.

The Scottish-born Carlyle, 36, is perhaps best known as Begbie, the thug in “Trainspotting” who engages in what director Danny Boyle calls “glassing”--”when you get shoved in the face with a glass or bottle and your face is completely cut to pieces.” Begbie is the most repellent figure in a movie that features petty thievery and graphic depictions of heroin addiction and withdrawal.

Now, reclining with one of his “mates” at the Parker Meridian, Carlyle muses on a role that emasculates guys like Begbie. In “The Full Monty,” which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival last winter, he plays Gaz, an unemployed divorced father who tries to drum up some money by organizing a Chippendales-type show with his friends. The joke is that none of them is attractive and none of them can dance.

“It’s a laugh at men, basically,” Carlyle says. “To me, the heart of the film is about gender politics. It’s about men suddenly having to look at themselves in the way that men have been looking at women for years.”

The choice of such a radically different project was deliberate. Carlyle has made a career out of moving as far away from the previous role as possible. He says this strategy will give him a longer “shelf life.” The logical conclusion is that actors are often “spoiled.”

“Sometimes that takes a great deal of strength, especially in the early part of your career when money is important to you to pay your bills,” he says. “I went through that time and managed to avoid that. And I’m at a situation now in life where financially things are OK and I don’t have to do that work.”

Like most British actors, Carlyle, who was born and raised in Glasgow, trained in the theater. He got his first big break playing what Antonia Bird--who has directed Carlyle in three films, including the recently concluded “Face”--describes as “a very gentle, very sensitive building worker” in Ken Loach’s “Riffraff.” Having seen that and met with him, she made a leap of faith and cast him as “a totally wildly out of control character” in “Safe” (not to be confused with the Todd Haynes movie of the same name). Then she turned around and cast him as the gay lover of a priest in the highly controversial “Priest.”

“I’d say that Antonia Bird was probably the only director on the planet who would have cast me in that role after ‘Safe,’ ” Carlyle says. “Because [the character in ‘Safe’] was a stereotypical hard-drinking, violent Scot, I could have disappeared into [an] obscurity of hard-drinking Scots and it would have served me right. This was really the catalyst because suddenly people saw that I wasn’t really like this.”

Since then Carlyle has operated between these two extremes, notably on television, which is sometimes the graveyard of feature film actors but in Carlyle’s case has enhanced his reputation. He is well-known in Britain for his role as a self-effacing cop in “Hamish Macbeth” and as a psycho in “Cracker,” about a man who avenges the deaths of 96 people at a soccer match by going after 96 cops and journalists. The soccer tragedy actually happened. The vengeance is wishful thinking. “Cracker” impressed Danny Boyle.

“He took over the national consciousness for a while,” says Boyle, who clearly saw elements of Begbie in this role and tried to get him into his feature film debut, “Shallow Grave.” “Everybody knew about it. Everybody said that he was pigeonholed in that part. He does it with such intensity that you think he’s getting pigeonholed but in fact he’s not. And Begbie’s just the latest one, really.”

‘The Full Monty” represents more than just a departure from Begbie: Carlyle gets to take his clothes off in front of several hundred screaming women, which is not nearly as amusing as it sounds. Director Peter Cattaneo actually combed local male strip joints in order to fill the audience with enthusiastic--and knowledgeable--extras. He then whipped them into a frenzy by exhorting them to give a big cheer to the star of “Hamish Macbeth.” (The cheer and Carlyle’s reaction to it translate very well on-screen.) To top it off, the actors had to hold a naked pose so the filmmakers could get a freeze frame for the end title sequence.

“It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do,” Carlyle says. “I just wanted to die.”

“I remember him telling me he had to get extremely drunk in order to do it,” Bird says.

It’s doubtful that Carlyle will be fielding any offers to strip in the near future. He’ll be doing what he describes as a pre-”Trainspotting” film about drugs in Edinburgh for the BBC, and then he’ll be traveling to Czechoslovakia to shoot “Plunkett and MacLeane,” a period picture about two highwaymen, with Liv Tyler and possibly his “Trainspotting” co-star Johnny Lee Miller.

Though excited about this last project, Boyle says Carlyle should think about expanding his horizons. When the director was attached to “Alien Resurrection” (before, he says, the scope of the movie and the special effects scared him off), he discussed a part in it with Carlyle. They’ve also kicked around the idea of doing a “Trainspotting 2,” this time with Begbie as the main character.

“There’s something that he hasn’t used a lot but he’s got,” Boyle says. “He’s got the intensity and charisma of a lead actor. He’s also got the range of a character actor. He’s got the option, really. I’ve said to Bobby that he should do some roles in the States because he’s done about everything he can do in Britain.”

“I can see him translated across the Atlantic and working here very successfully in the same way that Tim Roth and Gary Oldman have,” Bird says.

“There’s been some interest,” says Carlyle, who just bought a house in Glasgow. “You’re encouraged to come across, be here for a while, go to L.A., hang out. It’s just not something that interests me. It’s not that I have no interest in working in America, but I’m happy doing what I do in Britain. I work with top-class directors, scriptwriters, actors. It’s all good work. So in that sense there’s no reason for me to leave.”

Perhaps Carlyle’s feelings about and approach to acting can best be summed up by the expression “the full Monty.” According to director Cattaneo, it probably originated with British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery’s breakfast.

“He used to have a full English breakfast every morning before going into battle,” Cattaneo says. “Eggs, bacon, sausage, everything. It means the whole kit and caboodle. Say you’re going to get your car serviced. The tires, the wind screen, the oil changed--yep, the full Monty.”