THICK & SPIN COVER STORY COVER STORY AFTER FINDING EARLY SUCCESS IN

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Apr 6, 2008 | by PAUL DALGARNO

PETER Capaldi, the Scottish Oscar-winner, is about to blow, but not quite yet. His cropped and grey-fl ecked hair is getting closer to his eyebrows, but only because those eyebrows are raising sharply the left one, in particular, arcs like a hieroglyph over his steely left eye. He rubs his mouth, near seething, as if to hold the venom inside, and veins strain noticeably in his neck. "You've got to f***ing do things my way, whether you like it or not, " he says. "You're just a journalist from the Sunday f***ing Herald and I'm not interested in your opinions, OK? So just f***ing listen or you will not talk to me, or have access to my people, as long as you f***ing live." Capaldi settles back in his seat, spent. He has a habit of slipping unannounced into the body of Malcolm Tucker, the foul- mouthed spin doctor he has made his own in the cult political satire The Thick Of It. It's a little scary to be on the receiving end, even though he's just pretending, but he says he needs lots of practice. A full-length movie of the series is about to start filming. It will be set largely in Washington and placed loosely, but recognisably, in the context of the Iraq war.

The bile Capaldi brings to the role is born of past experience, dredged up and sieved into concentrated form, remoulded and transmitted like a virus through Tucker's pores.

Look at the highlights of Capaldi's career and you'd be pushed to find reasons for this anger: his breakthrough as Danny Oldsen in Local Hero in 1983, the Academy Award in 1993 for his short film Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life, his fame, since 2005, as an Alastair Campbell-style attack dog in The Thick Of It. But it's the decades in between, full as they have been with television roles, directing projects and bit parts in movies, that tell the real story. Not low points as such but . . .

"Troughs" he says, unleashing an infectious and rattling laugh, his eyes tightly closed, his head tilting back. The real Peter Capaldi has returned, fully affable. When he laughs, it's hard not to get swept along, although it's not really clear why we are laughing. "It's been great, " he says. "I was at the Baftas two years ago for the first time in ages and bumped into a friend I'd worked with a very long time ago. He grabbed me and said, 'We're still here, mate' and that's true, we're still here. It's a great profession to be in, and to have survived in for so long." He looks at the clock on his mobile phone, as if his life might be marked out digitally.

But mere survival is not necessarily enough, he says, not quite the fullment of his life's acting ambitions. He turns 50 next week a bugbear but no real biggy.

"It's OK, " he says. "But I wish I was 40. My father died a couple of years ago and at my age that starts happening to a lot of your peers and friends so you become more conscious of the ever- darkening shadow. But that's ne, it sort of propels you into doing more. Both myself and my wife are actually busier than we've ever been and that's a fantastic place to be." His wife, Elaine Collins, was also an actor and now develops programmes for ITV, which provides Capaldi with an alternative view of his profession.

Their 15-year-old daughter, Cissy, has no ambition to follow in their acting footsteps, a decision that cheers Capaldi no end, even though he's not lacking offers of work. After The Thick Of It movie provisionally called In The Loop he will start lming another series of the show for BBC Two. He is currently having a prosthetic head made for The Devil's Whore, a forthcoming mini-series in which he will play Charles I in the weeks leading up to his execution. Later this month he will guest star in Doctor Who as Caecillius, a marble dealer from Pompeii, who befriends the doctor and his new assistant.

Touching the Tardis was a dream, a ashback to the Jon Pertwee era of the show and his own childhood. "When I was a kid I wrote to the BBC and the producers sent me a huge package through the post with Doctor Who scripts, " he remembers.

"I'd never even seen a script and couldn't believe that they actually wrote this stuff down. It sort of opened a door." Until that point, doors had led in and out of rundown Glasgow tenement blocks in Keppochhill Road, Springburn, where the Capaldis and their relatives lived. On one side of the road "the tough side" were his mother's family, who came from Killyshandra in Ireland's County Cavan; on the other side was his father's family, who came originally from the hillside village of Picinisco in central Italy. Capaldi only recently discovered that The Thick Of It writer and director Armando Iannucci was raised in the same street and that their parents had once been friends.

The one time he visited Picinisco, he was struck by a war memorial in the main plaza with surnames he recognised from Glasgow sh and chip shops, hairdressers and icecream parlours. His own family's exodus began with his grandfather, one of seven brothers who went to America and lost a leg building the Brooklyn Bridge, before ending up, after stints in Newcastle and Liverpool, finding work in a Glasgow cafe. Or at least that's the myth.