Born and brought up in Elgin, Kevin wanted
to be an actor ever since he took part in school plays at "around
six or seven." He dropped out of Edinburgh University, where
he was studying engineering, to take up a drama course at Queen
Margaret's College, and from there was picked up by leading theatrical
agency ICM.
Mr McKidd is patron of Elgin-based drama group
Out of the Darkness Theatre Company, where his mother Kath is an
administrator.
Kevin McKidd has come a long way since he lay
in his bed in a council estate on the outskirts of Elgin in north
Scotland, dreaming of Steven Spielberg discovering him. "I
always thought I wanted to be Eliot," he explains. "I
wanted to have an alien as a mate. I wanted to be in a Spielberg
movie and hang out with E.T. because he was the coolest thing I'd
ever seen." The son of a plumber and a secretary in a lemonade
factory, who is now the administrator of a disabled children's theatre
company in Elgin, McKidd, the youngest of two brothers, had an impoverished
working-class upbringing. With no artistic influence, he fell into
acting as a result of athletic inadequacy. "I couldn't play
football because I was really fat," he explains patiently.
"I was a big beefer. When I was 14, I shot up and lost it,
but before that I was very short and dumpy." He pauses and
winces slightly. "Ask my mum if you don't believe me. The first
time I went on stage was during a school play and everyone laughed,
either because I was fat, or because I was being funny. I wasn't
sure. Anyway, it was a good buzz and I just knew that's what I wanted
to do."
His parents were less than keen. They wanted him
to do something grown up that had a future. So Kevin, by way of
appeasement, did engineering for part of one term at Edinburgh's
Queen Margaret College in 1992 and then switched to the drama course.
"As soon as it started to work they were very supportive,"
he remembers. "they are really cool people," he adds.
"They said: 'Look, we married young, had kids young, we never
had the chance to know what we could have done, so make sure that
you give it a stab.'"
Meanwhile, he and wife Jane have moved out of London to the Bedfordshire
countryside, to provide a bit of space for their two children, Joseph,
two and two-month-old Iona.
Kevin McKidd, who has starred in films including
Trainspotting and Dog Soldiers, has recently completed filming in
Tomintoul for his new movie The Bum's Rush.
