On screen, we expect Robert Carlyle to be a particular type of man: damaged and disenfranchised; the loser; the loner; the archetypal tortured soul. "These are the kind of characters that crop up time and time again throughout my whole career," says the 47-year-old Scot. "The question is whether they are pulled towards me or whether I am pulled towards them?"
An answer of sorts came when Carlyle was sent a script for the 2006 BBC homelessness drama Born Equal. He says he felt his heart sink when he looked at the role picked out for him, a troubled ex-con trying to get his life back on track. "I thought, I've played this guy before, it's too similar. Then I thought about it. I thought, is there anything wrong with that? What's wrong with re-examining that? Going back to that person again, shooting it slightly differently.
"My first love is art and I see a lot of things in an artistic way. And this is like a series of self-portraits in a sense. This is painting an image of me on a different path, a different road. That's interesting. If that has to be my fate, I'm happy with that, to play these kinds of guys. A lot of the characters I play have problems, they are marginalised, they have serious psychological problems, problems with relationships, with childhood. These are big subjects, big subjects. You can't balk at work like that. As an actor, that's as good as it gets."
And so it is with Summer, Carlyle's next project. Directed by Kenny Glenaan, it tells the story of two schoolfriends facing up to loss and disillusionment in middle-age. Carlyle plays Shaun, labelled a violent bully by the education system that cast him adrift, a man whose response to dyslexia was to crush his own hand in a vice. The role won Carlyle a Bafta Scotland best actor nomination, and the PPG award for best performance in a British film at this year's Edinburgh film festival. The jury called it a "flawless performance in a great, uncompromising film".
"I'm 47. I understand Shaun," says Carlyle. "I understand that man. I don't have any regrets in my own life, but I can sympathise and empathise with this guy who wakes up and realises his life is past and gone and what has it been for?"
We meet in Glasgow, Carlyle's hometown, where he lives with his wife, makeup artist Anastasia Shirley, and their three young children. We're not so very far from his birthplace in Maryhill. The hotel is just round the corner from his house, and so thickly carpeted you move without sound. He is in the lobby before you notice him, a slight figure in jeans and old leather, a scarf wound tight around his neck.
Carlyle hopes people will see past the deprivation and frustration of Shaun's existence to a man sustained by a deep, abiding friendship and harbouring a hidden sense of self. He's always looking for what lies beneath, he says, even in the most unhinged of personas. "He has had a bad hand in his life, has Shaun; he has been dealt a bad fucking hand. He tries his best, he knows, shit, he shouldn't have crushed his hand. But in these films, even in Ken Loach's films, there's always a heart; there's always a human heartbeat behind it. Kenny is a bit like the spawn of Ken Loach, you can see that in his work. It is the people. They tell the stories."
Loach gave Carlyle his first break, casting him in Riff Raff in 1991. Roles in Cracker, Trainspotting and The Full Monty followed quickly and made him a star. Summer, was filmed in Bolsover, not too far from Sheffield, where The Full Monty was set. As Gaz, unemployed steelworker turned stripper, he had been the heart of one of the biggest British films of all time.
"I had forgotten Bolsover is very close to Sheffield and Sheffield is the eye of the storm for me. I was like the fucking prodigal son. It was extraordinary; I felt I am actually theirs. That film, The Full Monty, was their film, therefore I'm their actor and I'm back home again." Carlyle was mobbed. Every day on set he was surrounded by kids, slapped on the back, asked for autographs. "It was a fucking great experience," he says.
As with The Full Monty, Summer's backdrop is bleak (even if the story, ultimately, is not), that of a land and people hollowed out by industrial decline. "We were in the back of this one house filming," says Carlyle. "If you had said it was derelict and no one had lived there for a year I would have believed you. There was a family there. You could not see the fucking floor for rubbish. It was horrific. As a person, it reminds you of the shit that some people have to go through on a daily basis. It's all too common somewhere like Bolsover and well beyond that. There is nothing there for these people any more. You can't escape the politics. It's in the landscape. That's what the film shows, why these guys are here doing fucking nothing because all this was taken away.
"I think it is one of the few locations that would have really, really worked for this film because of that backdrop, that background. Do you know, I used to think they were all fucking hills, these things - didn't realise they were slag heaps. It looks like a lunar fucking landscape. There are very few places like that that show the desolation, the emptiness."
Carlyle grows animated, hands sketching what he witnessed. But that's as overtly political as he gets these days. Last year, it emerged that Carlyle had voted for the Scottish National Party in the 2007 Holyrood elections and he was dismayed to discover himself painted as something of a poster boy for the nationalists. "I voted SNP because of the war," says Carlyle. "I'm not someone who believes in wasting my vote. I looked at all the parties and thought, 'Fuck it.' At the time, even the Liberal Democrats were not saying enough for me in terms of the antiwar stuff. I was not hearing it. That was why I went that way. I don't know if I would go that way again. I don't like to get pulled into it. It's too easy for people to talk about this; he's this or he's that. I'm apolitical in that sense. I don't take a great deal of interest in party politics. Social politics interests me a great deal more."
Where he is prepared to speak out is about Scotland's film industry, or lack thereof. He'd love to work more north of the border - it would mean he could go home to his kids every night - but the recent Stone of Destiny was Carlyle's first film in Scotland for 12 years, and it took a Hollywood director and Canadian money to make it happen.
'We don't have a film industry here. I would argue that vehemently. An industry is something that feeds itself and grows. We make one film every 10 years that gets any kind of notice. You can't call that an industry. Over the past 12 to 15 years I have probably had about five or six scripts that have been Scots films shooting here. Not one of them has fucking happened. I don't know the answer to that. It's got to the stage now with my agent, if something Scottish comes in it has to be financed, otherwise I'm not going to read it because it depresses me."
Part of the frustration comes from Carlyle's involvement in The Meat Trade, a darkly comic retelling of the exploits of Edinburgh's notorious grave robbers Burke and Hare. The screenplay is by Irvine Welsh; Carlyle, Samantha Morton and Colin Firth are all on board, and Antonia Bird is directing, but it has still been a struggle, he says, to try to get the film made in Scotland - production has now been postponed until next year.
He's been luckier with another of his projects. A chance remark in a previous interview that he has always wanted to play Leonard Rossiter has led to an approach by a film company considering a biopic of the late comedian. "I love comedy, and he's a fucking genius. I would love to play him. And, would you believe, I get an email from a guy in London saying they were starting to make a biopic of Leonard Rossiter, so I'm going to see the treatment."
After Summer, Carlyle will next be seen in a feature-length version of the cult US TV series 24. He spent part of the summer filming in South Africa with Kiefer Sutherland. The two have been friends since appearing together in the 2001 POW movie To End All Wars, and Sutherland had been trying for some time to get Carlyle involved in his hit franchise. 24 was everything that Summer isn't: big, showy, fast-paced. Carlyle, who plays agent Jack Bauer's best friend, had a ball, even though he is on record as saying the bigger the budget, the less a film is about.
"Something like 24 is enjoyable for an actor for entirely different reasons," he says. "What are you supposed to say? That it's not right to enjoy it? Why is that not right? Something like 24 is incredibly popular. Thirty to 40 million people watched it in the States. You have to take that. I don't have any snobbery about that.
"You know, I have never really approached them in different ways; big or small budget. The same honesty is required whether a film is big budget. I enjoy that. I'm fortunate in my career I'm getting the chance to do that, that I can play across the genres. I have got to be grateful for that."
• Summer is released on December 5.
