Views from the Glen of tranquility

At least, this used to be his attitude: time has mellowed him. When we met in 1993 as he prepared to play Macbeth in Michael Boyd’s celebrated staging at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre, he told me that, given the choice, he wouldn’t do any publicity at all. "I don’t believe the qualities I have as an actor in any way lend themselves to speaking about myself," he said. Even then, he was considerably less evasive than he made out, speaking freely about pretty much anything you asked. As the years have gone by, it’s clear he’s lightened up a whole lot more.

This is just as well. Back then, he was respected for his parts in Gorillas in the Mist, Paris by Night and Silent Scream, as well as stage roles in the big Shakespeare classics. He was well known but he could just about set himself above the tabloid tittle-tattle. But once you’ve done Lara Croft: Tomb Raider with Angelina Jolie, A Streetcar Named Desire at the National Theatre with Glenn Close, and Resident Evil: Apocalypse with Milla Jovovich, not forgetting those naked cartwheels with Kidman, you can’t keep ignoring the media circus.

"I’m more comfortable with it now," says Glen, 43. "I didn’t enter this business to get caught up in any of the peripheral stuff. It just has no meaning for me. To walk down a red carpet and have people flash cameras - I often get this out-of-body experience, thinking what a very silly world we live in.

"So I can never really occupy that world, but now I’ve learned not to worry about it. My strategy is to say, ‘Right, we’ll play this game for a bit.’ The game is that I look cool getting out of a stretch limo, smiling and waving. I’m off to the gala screening of Man to Man at the Berlin Film Festival tomorrow and I’ll do that thing - I’m quite looking forward to it, it’ll be a giggle and you get terribly spoiled. But I have no sense of wanting more of it."

So yes, today he’s happy to tell me - in fact, he volunteers it - that his girlfriend is Charlotte Emmerson whom he met two-and-a-half years ago at the National Theatre when she was in a Tom Stoppard and he was doing Tennessee Williams (more recently, they appeared together in The Seagull at the Edinburgh International Festival). He says he tries to be a good father to his nine-year-old son, Finlay, from his marriage to Susannah Harker, although it can be difficult when you’re in rehearsal one day and jetting off to some film premiere the next. "I’m not a weekend parent," he says.

He is open about all this, though he’d have good cause to be sensitive. His 16-year relationship with Harker fell apart at the start of 2002, some time after the big split between Kidman and Cruise, but the fact that he had acted with Kidman in the "pure theatrical Viagra" of The Blue Room in 1998 prompted intense tabloid speculation. He and Harker were close to Cruise and Kidman - they saw in the new millennium on Cruise’s yacht - and Glen was a shoulder to cry on for Kidman after her split.

Their friendship gave him his sharpest taste of life in the glare of the media. "There was a time when Tom and Nicole broke up that I got pursued for information around it. It was very disturbing. It made me realise what it must be like to have that all the time. For me it stopped and the story moved on."

But the point about all this on a practical basis is that when Glen goes into the rehearsal room with other actors, it’s the same job whether they’re global brand-names or unknowns. Glen is a team player, never in the business of upstaging his colleagues. When he played Macbeth in Glasgow, he was a highlight among highlights, and it was the same when he played Trigorin in The Seagull at the Edinburgh Festival - a performance described by one critic as "revelatory" - as a seamless part of the ensemble.

"THEATRE IS A great neutraliser and I love it for that," says Glen, the brother of Hamish, former artistic director of Dundee Rep. "Film is structured on a hierarchy. When I’ve worked with mega world stars like Angelina or Nicole all I cared about was the rehearsal and whether we were getting on with each other and making progress. It doesn’t matter how beautiful or sexy she is, if she was being tricky to me as an actor and not allowing me to find my role, that’s all I would care about. And I imagine they would say the same."

If there’s any upstaging to be done, he’s got the chance in Kidnapped, a three-part adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson tale filmed in New Zealand for CBBC. In a cast that includes Paul McGann, Adrian Dunbar and Gregor Fisher, Glen plays the swashbuckling Alan Breck, who rescues Davie Balfour (James Anthony Pearson) from the slave ship he’s been consigned to by his evil uncle.

"I hugely enjoyed that role," says Glen. "There was a lot of laughter and fun and I hope that comes through. We felt very on-song as a unit when we did it."

Glen admits he’s in the fortunate position to be able to follow his artistic instincts. He can afford to say yes or no to the offers he receives, whether he fancies playing a Highland hero on children’s TV, or doing a Hollywood film or theatre role - he’s about to open at London’s Almeida Theatre as Judge Brack in Hedda Gabler. "It’s true that certain projects do finance choice," he says, laughing that although his name has been mentioned in connection with the next James Bond, he’s never actually had a call from the producers about it. "You’re at the mercy of writing as an actor. I’m nothing unless someone gives me lovely words to say. So I seek them out because hopefully they’ll allow me to be good at what I do. If those words are in a piece of theatre at the Almeida or in a low-budget film somewhere, that’s what I crave. If I sought the purely financial reward then I’d very soon get locked into things that would not let me operate."

So how long before his career brings him back to Scotland? Will he be lured home by the nascent National Theatre of Scotland, which his brother Hamish was instrumental in establishing? "I’ve never had any snobbery about working outside London, which some people do. Of course, London is where my home is now, but it’s always just to do with the parts, the play and the director. My experiences working in Scotland have always been very happy ones.

"Anything is possible when I take on a Scottish job; people don’t pigeonhole you. I’ve always tried to dodge any notion that I’m one type of actor or more suited to one type of thing, and in Scotland I’ve never been perceived like that. I have an old-fashioned view of acting. Doing different sorts of roles is what turns me on. It’s something I’m hyper-conscious of in myself - that if I bore myself I’ll end up boring other people."

Kidnapped is broadcast on BBC1 from February 27. Hedda Gabler is at the Almeida Theatre, London, March 10 to April 30