Tough as a big woolly woofter

Three years ago Paul O'Boyle was prowling the streets with two German Shepherd dogs and earning his living as a hired thug. "I was horrifically violent," he says. " If I needed 200 quid for a drink or something and someone said to me, 'Listen so and so has been a bad boy and needs to be taught a lesson', me and a friend would, you know, bosh bosh, give that person a good kicking."

He looks and sounds like a character from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which is appropriate as, last December, he found himself playing a low-life gangster in Guy Ritchie's new film Snatch. Working on location in Croydon and surrounded by luvvies, O'Boyle must have lent an authentic atmosphere to the shoot - his tattoos (unlike those of Brad Pitt) did not need to be glued on each day, nor did he need to be shown how to use a sawn-off shotgun.

Born into a Catholic family in Dublin, O'Boyle became involved with a crime family at the age of 16. "They were not the IRA," he says. "But they were into everything - knee-capping, drugs, bank robbery." One morning he woke up to find himself covered with blood. It was not his own and he could not remember what had happened. A police car was parked outside the house.

His mother, trying to raise eight children, could not cope any more.

O'Boyle escaped to London, drank himself into oblivion for six months, lived on the streets, rang the Samaritans and joined Alcoholics Anonymous, which changed his life.

"I met film director Sara Sugarman in a club in London," he says. "She cast me as a policeman in Mad Cows. Then a casting director asked me to read Brad Pitt's part in a script reading. They needed somebody with an Irish accent. It wasn't an audition or anything, just £15 to read, but afterwards they rang me up and gave me a part."

He plays an Irish traveller who teams up with Brad Pitt's character, One Punch Mickey, to commit the various acts of erratic deviance for which Ritchie's films have become known.

"I was the skinhead," he says. "When the camera wanted someone to look mean it panned on me."

O'Boyle has received no formal training. When Ritchie told him to 'behave like a lunatic' he would tap into scenes of past savagery in order to perform his part. Ritchie, he says, is good at inciting mayhem. "He gets people worked up - he wants you to flip. But he also knows how to calm people down. He would have been a good football manager."

Having once bragged about breaking people's legs with pickaxe handles, O'Boyle now dines out on stories about Hollywood stars. His favourite? The night that Brad Pitt stole his underpants.

"It was 11 o'clock in the middle of December. We all had to wear underwear for a scene. There was a knock on the door of my trailer and someone says, 'Listen, you were wearing the purple pants weren't you?' and I said, 'Yeah', and he said, 'It's bit embarrassing but Brad Pitt wants to know can he wear them?' I can now say Brad Pitt has worn my pants. Without even washing them. I was very shocked and stunned I must admit. But I could see his point. Mine were paisley while his were just white with a blue stripe."

Now 27, O'Boyle does not smoke and he does not drink. "The way I live my life now is the reverse of how I lived my life then. Now I am too honest, too soft."

He lives in Thornton Heath with a boa constrictor named Marge. He still looks well hard but this is a mirage. He is, in fact, homosexual. "I knew when I was 17 and accepted it when I was 23," he says. "I do prefer people to know that I am gay because I spent so long avoiding it. When people are introduced to me they automatically presume that I am a certain person. When they find out that I am a screaming Mary they think, 'Well, my brother could be gay, my son could be gay ...' "