Dougray Scott is in a London hotel's white-furnished, panoramic-windowed penthouse suite. He is contorting his face into a series of squashy grins, eyebrow flicks and forehead ripples. "Look! I'll prove to you I've never had Botox!". Sure enough, his cheeks move as well as his lips.
Scott, whose Glenrothes values have yet to be overridden by the venal codes of Hollywood, is appalled by the very idea. "See the amount of actors who have had Botox: it's unbelievable. I can't understand how guys could do that. I can understand with women, who are almost expected to be beautiful to the day they die, which to me is obscene, but guys? Doing Botox? What the f*** is that about? Nothing moves."
His eyebrows do some more sit-ups. "They can't do that. It stays like that." He imitates the immobile, fishy face of the heavily-injected. "There's no movement."
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Has anyone suggested to Scott, who at 43 is palm-sweatingly good-looking, that he should consider a little work here or there? Discrete wrinkles move into a mask of horror. "No. I think it's a vanity choice. I'd be shocked and appalled if that was the case."
All of which means Scott has two advantages to bring to the casting meeting: a face perfectly constructed yet reassuringly lived-in, and the chunky self-confidence that finds the idea of visiting an aesthetic technician alien and repellent. His fellow Fifer, Richard Jobson, uses these to great effect in New Town Killers, the Edinburgh-set thriller which stars Scott as a psychotic, nihilistic hedge fund manager whose idea of entertainment is playing Hunt The Underclass with a loaded Glock.
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According to Jobson, "His character, Alistair Raskolnikov, is king of the vampires. Dougray plays him with incredible charm. And he's a handsome man and masculine, which I love in my movies, and which is unfashionable because most British actors are feline, gentle and into all kinds of interesting cosmic things. The guys in my stories are not particularly cosmic."
He wrote the part for Scott, who grew up three miles from Jobson's home village, Ballingry. The director is a few years older and, before New Town Killers, the two had a Scottish working class male, hands-free, nodding-only acquaintance. Scott had loved Jobson's biographical movie, 16 Years of Alcohol, and watched him as Sky TV's hipster version of Barry Norman.
"That's Richard Jobson, he was in the Skids, he was a film critic." Scott flashes the smile that persuaded the producers of Desperate Housewives to plant him in Wisteria Lane. "I was going to say a slightly annoying film critic but that's not very generous. He was mildly annoying sometimes. I remember him saying something about me one time." Scott tails off, suggesting this is a conversation that would have been concluded in the car park.
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Then New Town Killers arrived. "I loved the script, it was so clever with great muscularity. The character that he'd written, he says for me, which is a little bit frightening, was wonderful and vivid." Scott's Alistair enlists Jamie, played by the Monarch of the Glen star Alastair Mackenzie, in an all-night game of hide and seek with Sean, a young man Alistair has identified as disposable and vulnerable. All this allows Scott's character to wear a becoming grey sweater, shoot a tramp without a backwards glance and be driven around Edinburgh's underbelly in a Maserati Quattroporte.
To prepare for this role, Jobson pointed Scott towards Friedrich Nietzsche and Arvo Pärt (suddenly I remembered why Jobson's film criticism could be considered annoying). But, with the insights of German existentialism and the sparse melodies of an Estonian composer in mind, Scott plays Alistair as a charismatic psychopath who crunches a Leith radge's head with the heel of his boot without rumpling his Armani cashmere; a man who warms the teapot before pouring the scalding brew over hapless Sean's pregnant sister.
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Jobson was worried that the audience who had liked Scott as Teri Hatcher's suitor in Desperate Housewives would hate him as what he insists on describing as a "Nietzschean ubermensch". The opposite happened. "Women find what he's done reprehensible and it is; but he's quite sensual in his own way. It's a visual thing. He's very charming and quite sexy."
Scott's Alistair is a chilling piece of work. "On the outside Alistair is creating this mayhem, behaving in a sadistic, psychopathic, sociopathic manner," he says. "Inside there's this beautiful, serene, haunting, comforting, almost romantic music going on. That was the pull of the character.
"Do we like him?" Cue a disarming smile, activating the untreated, suntanned wrinkles around his eyes. "Of course we hate people like Alistair. We like the manifestation of him and how he's constructed, because he's entertaining. But only because he serves a purpose for the overall message of the film, which is to highlight the discrepancies and the way which we as a society marginalise, ignore, make invisible the dispossessed and the vulnerable."
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New Town Killers is not a party political broadcast for Tommy Sheridan's SSP, which Scott, from a left-wing family, supported in 2003. It would be kinder to call it an action thriller with a message, made for £1m, a sum which might have paid for Scott's trailer in Mission: Impossible II. Somehow he is comfortable with the contradictions of being a left wing movie star, working with Scientologists, lollipop-shaped actresses and Fifers on a budget, as the project demands.
Shooting in hours what Hollywood would stretch into a week didn't bother him. Jobson and Scott became great friends while making New Town Killers, allowing the director to milk his star's good nature. Not that he minded: "I couldn't wait to get on set the next day. This is why I'm an actor.
"I loved working off the cuff. Richard would say: let's try this, let's try that. I just need to have another hour. I wrote this thing this morning. What I do as an actor is I prepare, so I can be prepared for the unprepared. I know some people get unnerved by that but if you trust the director it can be much much better."
Since finishing New Town Killers last year, Scott has made three British TV series, including an adaptation of Day of the Triffids with Eddie Izzard and Vanessa Redgrave. On Friday he left for Argentina, to shoot a Spanish Civil War saga with Roland Joffé. He sounds busy but the recession has had, he says, "a huge effect on my industry: the number of independent films that get made, television productions have taken a hit, theatre productions, everything is affected." The myth that showbiz thrives in hard times is, says Scott, just a myth.
Economics mean more to Scott than the percentage he gives his agent. I mention the name Gordon Brown, a fellow Fifer, and am rewarded with an in-depth lecture on the inequalities of his fiscal policy, delivered in a modernist penthouse while we drink Scandinavian water costing £5 a bottle.
"The rich don't pay taxes," he says with Sheridanesque conviction. "I know they don't, because I've had conversations with them. Gordon Brown is well aware of that. It's such an unjust system we find ourselves in, especially with the economic pickle and the f***-up that those hedge fund managers, private bankers and banking institutions, RBS, the list goes on, have got us into.
"I'm not talking millions, it's billions. Why is he letting them get away with paying 10% on capital gains? They should pay more on what their income is."
Scott has struggled, he says, to defend Brown. "Should I feel sympathy for him? I guess I do as a human being. He's trying to do his best. I don't think he's a bad man, I don't think he set out to be partly responsible for the recession. But if you jump into the fire, you have to be ready to get burned."
He laughs. Most film-promoting interviews are spent avoiding nosey questions about on-set bust-ups and impending divorces, not dissecting economics.
"I don't read reviews because I know some of them will not be very kind. I know when I take on a project that there's going to be an opinion out there about me, but I'm an actor, so it's not a life or death situation. .
"What can I do? I can make people laugh, smile, feel connected, resonate with them and hopefully they'll go home feeling a little less lonely or at least with a different perspective on life. That's if I do a good job. If the prime minister does a good job people have food on the table, they get a few more pounds a week, their children get a better education. If he does a bad job there's less money for people like that, and it is a matter of life and death."
He crinkles his eyes again. "I guess what I'm saying is his job's more important than mine."
New Town Killers is on general release