When she was a teenager, Kelly Macdonald had a thing about vampires. And after an almost three-decade career, which runs from Trainspotting to Line of Duty, she is finally playing one.
She stars opposite Damian Lewis in The Radleys, which is out in cinemas and on Sky Cinema today, about a seemingly ordinary suburban family with a dark secret: they’re bloodsuckers trying to fit in. And receiving the script, based on the 2010 Matt Haig novel, prompted a wave of nostalgia for the actress.
“The whole vampire thing brought me back to being a teenager,” she says. “I was very into that section of the library and watching vampire films. It spoke to that and I got a bit excited like a teenager.”
These were pre-Twilight days so the films of choice were 1987’s The Lost Boys (“I loved it”) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula five years later, which prompts a revelry about a crush from the time.
“I did have this Gary Oldman obsession,” Macdonald says, “He was in Dracula, so I bought fangs. Nothing sinister, just me in my teenage bedroom putting on my secret plastic fangs and looking longingly at this magazine page I’d torn out of Gary Oldman as Dracula.” She laughs at the memory, before clarifying it was a picture of Oldman as “sexy Dracula not old Dracula.”
Macdonald talks about why teenagers, including her younger self, may be drawn to vampires. “Especially for teenage girls it seems to be a thing. I think it’s the blood, the bleeding aspect is the big thing for tweens. This thing happens that is bodily and strange and dark and you don’t talk about it. You don’t go up to people and talk about your period.”
The kicker is that in The Radleys, Macdonald’s character Helen, the slightly frazzled mum, is the only vampire who doesn’t actually get to show off her fangs onscreen as she keeps her murderous tendencies well hidden.
“I was properly stroppy about not having fangs in the make-up trailer,” she says. “The others were all taunting me that they got to rock the teeth.”
The Radleys is a different sort of vampire movie – basically a vampire domestic drama. It’s a coming-of-age story and one of a family unravelling as secrets emerge (and not just the secret about blood sucking). It’s about the very human problems of anxiety, fitting in, addiction (drinking blood could be substituted for alcoholism or drug dependency) and change.
“It all starts to go wrong when the kids become teens. And it’s about how there is a change in the air when you have a teenager in the room,” she says.
It is a film about keeping down who you really are and the affect that can have. “Anxiety is a massive thing. Sometimes you’re trying to keep something in and when it does appear it can eat away at you and that’s what the film is showing.”
I ask in this story of a family having to hid its true self if there are parallels with celebrity, of having to put on an act in public or force certain things down. Not for Macdonald it turns out. “It’s never really been a problem. There are other people who do this job who are much more visible. I get it in a very low-level way where I feel a bit different.”
Of a fabulous CV of more than 60 credits – looking at her IMDB profile she seems rarely out of work – there are some real fan favourites. Is she approached more for Trainspotting, Boardwalk Empire, No Country for Old Men or Line of Duty?
Apparently most people who clock her don’t always know why. “It’s a bit like walking around with jam on your face,” she says. “[Often people] just say hello to me thinking they know me, and I say hello back, and then I’ll see them doing a double take when they walk past.”
But those standout roles, of course, do bring their fans, “Line of Duty was a big one, but I live in Scotland so Trainspotting never stops being talked about. I’m still the girl from Trainspotting which is kind of bonkers because I’m 48!”
She lives in Glasgow, where she grew up, with her two boys (she split up with Travis bassist Dougie Payne after 14 years in 2017) and she is rarely out of work.
And it all started with Trainspotting. She picked up a flyer while working in a bar aged 19 and auditioned on a whim and landed the role of schoolgirl Diane. She landed the role and had a blast. “I thought it was par for the course and that every job would have that atmosphere and excitement… there was definitely some special magic going on. It did change things for me but not in a too fast way. It wasn’t a franchise thing like Daniel Radcliffe.”
Amazingly she hasn’t seen the film since its premiere in 1996. “There’s films I’ve done that I haven’t’ watched at all. What I wasn’t expecting was in T2 [the sequel to Trainspotting released in 2017] that they’d show some of the original. That was incredible because I hadn’t seen it for a while.”
She enjoyed returning for the sequel. “It was really nice coming back, to see everyone. It was really nice for me because I was just a guest on it. There was no pressure. It was like getting to hang out with college friends.”
But she’s still not tempted to watch the original again. “If I’ve missed a big screening event, I find it difficult in my own time to sit down and watch something [I’m in], there are other things to watch and there’s always other things to do.”
She doesn’t like watching herself “a lot of the time” but she did for The Radleys. “I enjoyed watching that. I had a great time making that, it was a really happy experience. Watching it was like ‘Yeah’. I won’t say surprised, but it was nice not to want to punch myself in the face afterwards.”
As we speak, currently she has a bit of downtime and is enjoying it. “I feel very good. It’s that funny thing that’s my life in that I don’t really know what the next exciting thing is going to be. There’s always something that magically appears. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
