You disappear off the map for three weeks. When he’s directing an episode - which he’s about to do, for the fourth time - his family get used to him being so absent from home. McKidd does 14 hours a day on the show, five days a week, almost ten months a year and is paid an estimated $1 million a year. Such are the punishing rigours of making American telly, especially one as long-running and successful as the medical drama. And he’ll be heading straight back on set afterwards. McKidd has rushed here from a morning shooting Grey’s Anatomy. Back then he was dressed in character as a Crombie-coated, boot-wearing bovver boy. Although he’s less menacing than when I last met him, on the Edinburgh set of 16 Years of Alcohol (2003), Richard Jobson’s semi-autobiographical memoir of boozing and fighting in small-town 1970s Scotland. He’s as Scottish - unstarry, strong accent, gingerish - as he was when we first met on the Glasgow set of Trainspotting in 1995. I meet Kevin McKidd the day after seeing Brave, in a Hollywood hotel. ‘Why? Dunno! An upsurge of Scottish ex-patriotism, I guess.’ ‘Ewan’s learning the bagpipes,’ reveals McKidd. McGregor, meanwhile, has also been facing up to his own midlife Celtic crisis. Och aye the noo, it’s true - the tartan-tastic Brave is Brigadoon to Trainspotting’s, uh, Drug-adoon. They’ve gotten rid of the housing schemes!’ McKidd laughs. ‘Yeah, they’ve just airbrushed Scotland and made it even more perfect.
On the animation house’s 13th movie nothing is left to chance, from the use of comic-book Scottish phraseology (jings, crivvens and ‘help ma boab!’) to the deployment of fiddly-diddly folk music by the whisky barrel-load (Mumford & Sons wrote the closing song and pixie-like Birdy sang it). The box office-busting Pixar team - makers of 12 previous features, including Toy Story, Cars and Up, which have collectively taken $12 billion - have applied their customary polish to Brave. But as soon as they saw Brave at the LA premiere, my kids were like, “We want to go back to Scotland!” ’ Last month the McKidds duly found themselves on the River Findhorn in the northeast of Scotland, white-water rafting, before repairing to granny and grandpa’s house, ‘sitting on the sofa and eating Jammie Dodgers…’ ‘So, yeah,’ the actor acknowledges with a grin, ‘the film does have a certain effect.’ ‘This summer we were thinking of going to Colorado and some of the other states we hadn’t seen. McKidd - and children, and wife Jane - tackled his patriotic nostalgia head-on. McKidd gives both characters an accent close to his own, with an added topspin of ‘teuchter’ (the Scottish word for a yokel). The latter is a suitor of heroine Princess Merida, brought to sparky life by Macdonald, another Trainspotting alumnus. In Brave, McKidd, born and raised in the Highlands, is the voice of clan chief Lord MacGuffin and his son Young MacGuffin. So does his one-time Trainspotting co-star Ewan McGregor. Even if the kid is a flame-haired tomboy princess (voiced by Kelly Macdonald) in a mythical Caledonia of witches, sword-wielding clansmen and murderous bears, while the mum is a graceful queen (Emma Thompson) married to a one-legged warrior-king (Billy Connolly), I relate. What’s their excuse?) No, I’m welling up because Brave, the latest animation from Pixar, is giving me, a Scotsman, thousands of miles from heart and hearth, a severe dose of homesickness.īrave is that kind of film: a love letter to a romanticised, Hollywood vision of Scotland, centred on the volatile relationship between a rebellious kid and her mother. (Weirder still: there are other unaccompanied blokes in the darkened theatre. Not because I’m a solitary man at a showing of a kids’ cartoon, although that’s weird enough. N a scorching afternoon in LA, I’m in a cinema in The Grove, the city’s swanky open-air shopping mall. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.