A hard act to follow

Sitting in a comfy armchair in London's Charlotte Street Hotel, Robert Carlyle tucks into a chicken Caesar salad and a glass of white wine. You can't help but wonder what Begbie might say.

Although Trainspotting's resident psycho is more than a decade old, he remains Carlyle's defining role, and would probably deck the actor for going soft. However, Carlyle is still hard as nails when it comes to making a stand.

Earlier this year he delivered an expletive-riddled reply to remarks made by Channel 4 chief and fellow Scot Stuart Cosgrove, who claimed that Scots like to celebrate failure and poverty. "The basis of what I said in retaliation to that, I stand by," says a firedup Carlyle. "I don't think anybody is celebrating poverty. How can you say that? It's ridiculous."

Wearing his heart on his paisley-patterned sleeve, Carlyle is not at his most relaxed being interviewed. Tabloids have turned him over in the past, tracking down his mother (who walked out when he was four) and revealing his wedding plans to make-up artist Anastasia Shirley, his wife of nearly eight years.

Being thrust into the spotlight after playing an unemployed steelworker-turned-stripper in The Full Monty didn't help, either. "I didn't cope very well with it at first," he admits. "I come from a theatrical background [in 1991 he co-formed the innovative stage group Rain Dog], where it was all about the work. It's not about celebrity. I rejected that word utterly, and I still reject it."

Despite playing a Bond villain in The World Is Not Enough, Carlyle has eschewed the Hollywood path taken by his Trainspotting co-star, Ewan McGregor. "It's just not my cup of tea," he says. "If acting's about anything, it's about observation of life in general. Where I live, and where I exist, is in the backstreets of Belfast, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. It's no good for me to go to Los Angeles. There's nothing there for me to take from."

His distrust of the place is such that when he heard that the co-star of his latest film, the Belfast-set The Mighty Celt, would be The X-Files' Gillian Anderson, he almost pulled out. "If it had been some sort of stupid box-office attempt - no disrespect to Gillian but she's no Nicole, she's not going to open a film - I'd have smelt a rat," he admits.

In the film, Carlyle plays O, a former IRA member haunted by his past. Many of Carlyle's best performances - from his Hillsborough-avenging psychopath in Cracker to his F¸hrer in the TV drama Hitler: The Rise Of Evil - have seen him humanise figures of hate, so he makes no apologies for playing a terrorist.

"There's no doubt the IRA killed a lot of innocent people, and I don't want to sit and defend anything they ever did, but there's something interesting about these people after the event. To ask them, 'Why did you do it?'" Since we are meeting just days after the 7 July suicide bombings in London, his words have even greater resonance.

Carlyle's production company, 4 Ways, was responsible for The Hamburg Cell, director Antonia Bird's credible examination of the men behind the 9/11 attacks. "I was really proud to be associated with that film," says Carlyle, who formed the company with Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh and Bird (she also directed the actor in TV drama Safe, then in the movies Priest, Face and Ravenous).

Yet while Carlyle is about to reunite with Bird on The Meat Trade, a thriller about 19th-century Scottish serial killers Burke and Hare, from a script by Welsh, he cannot conceive of being involved with a film about the recent London attacks. "I wouldn't touch it because I don't understand it. The whole Irish question, I understand what was going on."

Carlyle is keen to reprise the role of Begbie in Porno, Welsh's sequel to Trainspotting, but the future of the project is still uncertain. While he admits the original became seen as a Britpop fashion statement "which I was doing my best to run away from", he sees Begbie as "a rather important character, socially, in terms of the Scottish psyche. It's about this whole machismo thing. I would like to revisit that, so we can put that in a box and go, 'There's your Scottish f***ing hardman, and he's an asshole!'"