Ay’ll kill y’r mommy,” hisses Brian McCardie in an icy Belfast Protestant accent. “Ay’ll kill y’r daddy. Ay’ll born their fock’n hoyse doyn!” This was the climatic speech of his performance as a loyalist paramilitary in last month’s Murphy’s Law. As we talk, he’s using it to demonstrate the subtle differences with the Co Antrim accent that he’s employing now for the filming of Lilies (an eight-part drama for BBC One in which he plays an Ulster Protestant father bringing up Catholic daughters in 1920s Liverpool). I won’t even attempt to transliterate the Antrim version of the bloodcurdling threat, but it sounded a trifle more good-humoured.
McCardie is one of those character actors whose face you can never put a name too, but now, after a bumpy period, he appears to be on a roll. The executive producer of Murphy’s Law was so impressed by the tortured menace of his character that he recruited him to play Mark Strong’s sidekick in Low Winter Sun (Channel 4, Thursday). This is a stylish, intelligent, morally bleak, two-part police thriller set in Edinburgh, which constantly wrong-foots both characters and audience.
The plot is an intricate mesh of police corruption, the sexual exploitation of Eastern European girls and the peddling of dodgy meat. It is inventively violent, featuring dismemberment and the unorthodox use of carcass-stripping equipment. In the opening episode we see Strong and McCardie drown a man in the lobster tank of a Chinese restaurant.
McCardie plays Joe Geddes, a policeman whose dead partner was responsible for sucking him into corruption. “He is someone who has repeatedly betrayed his own morality,” says McCardie, “and he has done that for so long that he only thinks of expediency. He’s someone who’s been selling his own self-respect.” Mark Strong brings his brooding intensity to the lead role, but McCardie is every bit as compelling.
Written by Simon Donald, the drama has been developed by the director Adrian Shergold. “Adrian is just fantastic,” says McCardie, “very astute and creative and spontaneous. He’s been working on it on and off for six years and he’s thought through every single line precisely.”
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McCardie was brought up in Carluke, a small town between Edinburgh and Glasgow, where his father, a tool-maker, ran his own business. Two of Brian’s brothers work in the film industry.
Something of an expert on accents, he has worked with many non-Scots assuming Scottish accents over the years, including Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange in Rob Roy. Val Kilmer in The Ghost in the Darkness “did a couple of scenes in quasi-Irish,” he recalls, “then ended up doing American with a slight lilt. Mark Strong’s accent has been the best. At the first read-through he only got two or three words wrong.”
McCardie’s role as Rob Roy’s kid brother brought a spell in Hollywood where he made Speed II: Cruise Control, “‘which I would have to say is an absolutely stinking film!” he laughs. “I was told it would be a good career move. But the whole concept seemed flawed. It’s set on a cruise ship and cruise ships aren’t speedy! And it’s sailing in the sea, so they couldn’t show it in relation to anything else, not even gathering speed! I was embarrassed when I went to see it.” He also worked with Courtney Love on 200 Cigarettes.
During this phase a story started circulating that he had blown all his money on extravagant living and boys’ toys and had to be bailed out by his brothers. This was a complete fabrication, McCardie insists, concocted by a Scottish tabloid hack “who specialises in hatchet-jobs . . . By my parents’ reckoning I was extremely wealthy.” He is clearly delighted, though, that his television career is gaining real momentum now.
This production isn’t just morally dark. The lighting can be positively sepulchral, as if shot through a blue-grey filter. I ask if this isn’t becoming something of a Scottish cliché with series such as Taggart and Rebus shrouded in perma-gloom. “Adrian put a lot of colours into this,” he says, “and visual richness. But you only have to visit Edinburgh to see how Gothic the place feels. The clouds seem darker and more malevolent.
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We were filming from January to early March and dark storm clouds would appear with no notice. To ignore that would be asinine.”
His role had particular challenges, like delivering dialogue while wearing an oxygen mask. “The secret was to do it and find out if anyone understood me,” he laughs. “To my mind it was a great advantage that Adrian was a southern Englishman because anything he couldn’t understand, a large proportion of the audience wouldn’t understand either. He could be a barometer.”
For much of part two he wears a facial prosthetic after a severe beating. “I was supposed to have a couple of broken ribs. I’ve had bruised ribs before, and I know that it’s movement that causes the greatest pain. So I put two screws within the bandage so that whenever I moved, they dug into me, so it would help me with that.” In one scene Alex Fearns, who plays a sadistic abattoir-manager and pimp punches him repeatedly in his injured ribs. So it really hurt then? “Yeah. It really did!” he chuckles, “but Alex is really such a nice guy that he stopped the first take and asked if I was all right.” The scene is wince-making: another fine detail in a fine performance.