One of the good things about playing a therapist, saysKelly Macdonaldwith a laugh, is that you get to sit down a lot. There’s a fun scene in the new Netflix thriller Dept Q in which her character, Dr Rachel Irving, weary of her client DCI Carl Morck, plants herself down behind her desk to eat her packed lunch in front of him. Morck may be the kind of troubled detective we’re used to seeing in police dramas, but Irving isn’t a typical therapist. She’s blunt, antagonistic even. It’s a “shitty” job working with police officers, she tells him. Another time she describes him as “doolally”, which in my experience is not something a typical therapist would say; Macdonald, who has had therapy, “but not regularly”, may agree.
In the show – adapted from novels by the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen and brought to the screen by Scott Frank, who was also behind the Netflix hit The Queen’s Gambit – Morck is made to see Irving after he survives a shooting. Brilliant but sidelined, Morck is tasked with reviewing cold cases, and moved to a shabby basement office that becomes known as Department Q. The first case for his small crew of misfit detectives is the disappearance of a lawyer four years earlier, who everyone thinks is probably dead. The truth, it soon emerges, is absolutely terrifying.
Did Macdonald think she’d be playing a police officer on the show – a role she has played in Line of Duty,Giri/Haji, and Black Mirror? “No. They specifically told me what it was going to be. But I think I’ve played a therapist before as well.” We’re speaking over Zoom; Macdonald is in Los Angeles where she is filming Lanterns, an HBO adaptation of the Green Lantern comics in which – is this right? – she plays a detective. “I don’t actually, I play a sheriff. Very different.” She laughs. “I wear a hat and everything.”
Macdonald, now 49, has been there since January, and it’s hard being away from her two sons, 12 and 17, though they’ve been out to see her and she gets home to Glasgow whenever she can. “The guilt never gets easier,” she says. “I think that’s just a working mum thing – you never feel like you’re doing either thing as well as you should be. They understand what I’m doing and where I am, and we’ve got technology at least, so we can see each other’s faces.” She follows them on their phones, “to see where they are, like a sneak, checking up on them. I was doing that a few weeks ago and I zoomed out, and suddenly it was just the Earth, and they were there and I was here. I know this, but it really did something to my brain. Because it’s far.”
Not to make assumptions about boys, but presumably they’re more impressed by her work in Lanterns, or her role in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, than, say, Gosford Park? “We don’t really discuss it too much,” she says. “I did show one of them the prop green lantern. It doesn’t feel like I’m doing a comic thing – it’s a drama.”
One day they will surely be impressed that their mother was a 90s icon. Macdonald’s debut was in Trainspotting, playing Diane, the sassy (underage) teenager Ewan McGregor’s Renton gets involved with. Macdonald’s parents divorced when she was a child and she grew up in Glasgow with her mother and brother. She didn’t do much drama at school but she loved films and TV – even adverts stuck in her mind, and she would act them out. Macdonald remembers one summer when she was obsessed with the western musical Calamity Jane, and would go out to see which other kids were around her estate, and try to get them to act out scenes from it. None of them knew it, she says with a smile. “Other kids weren’t so interested.”
Acting, for Macdonald, “was my form of play. I was always pretending, and it was pretty private, like in my bedroom.” She was reminded of it recently because her older son is doing exams; Macdonald did fairly well at English because she would learn dialogue in her room. She wanted to be an actor but didn’t really have much of a plan (a theme, it becomes apparent, throughout her life). Then someone gave her a flyer for open auditions forwhat would become Trainspotting.
She was 18 and working in a restaurant. As she progressed through the stages towards getting the part, it was “excruciating” she remembers. “Especially when Ewan McGregor was in the room. He says he couldn’t even see what I looked like because I was holding my script covering my face.” In hindsight, she says she can see Trainspotting and its stars were part of a British boom. “At the time I didn’t feel special, I didn’t feel part of a …” She pauses. A picture of an old magazine cover came up online recently, and she clicked on it. “It was, like, Cool Britannia or something. And I was in it. That’s really funny today, it’s very nice.”
Did she not go to celeb parties? Hang out with Liam Gallagher and Kate Moss? “I might have gone out with Kate Moss once,” she says, her face crinkling at the effort of dredging her memory. She didn’t really hang out with actors and wasn’t part of a “scene” – she still isn’t. She does remember going to premieres of films she wasn’t in. “I can’t imagine doing that now,” she says with a laugh. “I barely want to go to my own.” Her life in Glasgow – her home town, and that of her former husband, the Travis bassist Dougie Payne – is “pretty boring”, she says. “I’m surrounded by boys and animals. I have a very low-key life, it suits me.” She misses it when away. “I need to go and nest.”
Was it a deliberate choice to create a down-to-earth life? She never did the Hollywood hustling thing, and doesn’t do social media. “I’m a pretty patient person and every now and then a great script does come along, luckily, and I get the opportunity to be a part of something.” It’s not that she isn’t ambitious. “I want to do good stuff and work with good people, I just don’t know what the thing is until it comes up, and that’s kind of the way it’s always been.”
Macdonald has done great work, and worked with great people – four years in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, a role in No Country for Old Men, some lovely Brit films such as The Girl in the Café Nanny McPhee, and Swallows and Amazons, not to mention the TV juggernaut that was Line of Duty. With years of acclaim and experience behind her, it was fun to be in the 2017 Trainspotting sequel and not feel intimidated the way she did on the first one. “I’d seen Ewan at various points in the interim, and it was just really nice to feel like I was with a peer, rather than someone way beyond my sphere. We got to hang out and I wasn’t hiding in the toilets.”
Even so, Macdonald still sometimes feels a little like she did back then. “I mean, aspects have got easier, but when they say ‘action’, it immediately feels like it always did that first time. Like you forget how to walk, really simple things.” She laughs. “I basically want to please my bosses. I want to please the director. If you get through the first day, it gets better after that.” She meets younger women, “and I just am so impressed by them”, she says. “They are unapologetic, and will correct you if you’re down on yourself about something small and piffling. But that’s just the way I was brought up, to be self-deprecating, and they’re having none of it. It’s really impressive.”
It took her until her 40s to feel more like that, she says. “You stop giving so much energy to things that are silly and don’t serve you. I just feel like I’m less apologetic about who I am.”
If Macdonald is still fixed as that teenager in Trainspotting in many people’s minds, she has been busiest, with her best work, in her late 30s and 40s. “It’s very exciting to read something and feel you can connect to it in some way, and you want to play-act the scenes like I did when I was a kid. Most of my working life, I’m in a room on my own learning lines, which is how I used to play.” It can feel like a slog when it’s not working for her. “But I know when it’s a good one, because I’m quite happy to be back in that room.”
Dept Q is on Netflix on 29 May.