Brave heart: Meet great Scot Kevin McKidd

On a scorching afternoon in LA, I’m in a cinema in The Grove, the city’s swanky open-air shopping mall. I feel a bit strange. Not because I’m a solitary man at a showing of a kids’ cartoon, although that’s weird enough. (Weirder still: there are other unaccompanied blokes in the darkened theatre. 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.

Brave 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. 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.

Kevin McKidd knows the feeling. So does his one-time Trainspotting co-star Ewan McGregor. In Brave, McKidd, born and raised in the Highlands, is the voice of clan chief Lord MacGuffin and his son Young MacGuffin. The latter is a suitor of heroine Princess Merida, brought to sparky life by Macdonald, another Trainspotting alumnus. McKidd gives both characters an accent close to his own, with an added topspin of ‘teuchter’ (the Scottish word for a yokel).

The 39-year-old has been based in LA for six years, the last four of them playing the role of former army medic Dr Owen Hunt in top-rated medical drama Grey’s Anatomy. McGregor, meanwhile, relocated here four years ago. Sixteen years since they starred in Danny Boyle’s cult adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s picaresque novel about Edinburgh junkies, the two jocks-away recently reconnected. And misty-eyed recollections of the homeland weren’t far from either’s thoughts.

‘Being in vocal booths in studios in Burbank or San Francisco,’ recalls McKidd of his four-year involvement in the making of Brave, ‘and talking like a teuchter, that did make me homesick. I have been getting a lot more homesick. Ewan was saying the same thing: that we’re hitting a certain point in our lives and we’re thinking, “It’s great living here in LA, blah blah blah, but…” ’ McKidd, father of Joseph, 12, and Iona, ten, shrugs. ‘My kids are very settled, so I’m probably trapped here for a while. But yeah, there’s a lot to be said for your home country, especially the older you get. And the older your mum and dad get, you start worrying about them, all that kind of stuff.’

McKidd — and children, and wife Jane — tackled his patriotic nostalgia head-on. ‘This summer we were thinking of going to Colorado and some of the other states we hadn’t seen. 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.’

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. 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).

‘Yeah, they’ve just airbrushed Scotland and made it even more perfect. They’ve gotten rid of the housing schemes!’ McKidd laughs. Och aye the noo, it’s true — the tartan-tastic Brave is Brigadoon to Trainspotting’s, uh, Drug-adoon. McGregor, meanwhile, has also been facing up to his own midlife Celtic crisis. ‘Ewan’s learning the bagpipes,’ reveals McKidd. ‘Why? Dunno! An upsurge of Scottish ex-patriotism, I guess.’

I meet Kevin McKidd the day after seeing Brave, in a Hollywood hotel. He’s as Scottish — unstarry, strong accent, gingerish — as he was when we first met on the Glasgow set of Trainspotting in 1995. 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. Back then he was dressed in character as a Crombie-coated, boot-wearing bovver boy.

McKidd has rushed here from a morning shooting Grey’s Anatomy. And he’ll be heading straight back on set afterwards. Such are the punishing rigours of making American telly, especially one as long-running and successful as the medical drama. 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. 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. ‘It's like working on an oil rig. You disappear off the map for three weeks. But I think they’ve got used to that over time — it’s what my job’s always been.’