Robert Carlyle: I said no to Barney Thomson film five times

The Scottish star takes on the title role of the murderous barber in the big-screen screen adaptation of Douglas Lindsay’s novel The Long Midnight Of Barney Thomson, which also marks his directorial debut.

“It was offered to me purely as an actor four or five times over a 10-year period. I was doing other stuff, and I said to my agent, ‘Listen, the next time this thing comes through my letterbox, I’m going to be waiting with a gun because it’s beginning to annoy me’,” the 54-year-old Glaswegian said.

He added: “There was [always] something not quite right with it. It was a Glasgow setting, but it wasn’t a Glasgow I knew.”

The project followed the actor to Canada, where he was shooting the fantasy TV series Once Upon A Time. He got talking to a producer friend who said there was a script he should read, and when he received it, he discovered it was “f***ing Barney Thomson!”

“It was following me!” Robert said.

Despite having directed in the theatre, it was never his intention to direct the movie.

“I was just thinking about getting the characters and the script worked out so if it did ever happen, it would be in a good place,” he explained.

“Meanwhile the producers, the sneaky people, were behind the scenes going, ‘This could be Robert Carlyle acting and directing’, and the financiers thought this was a great idea. Suddenly I was like, ‘Hold on a minute, I never said I’d do this’.”

But in June 2014, with no director on board, he thought: “I guess I know this piece better than anybody by now, so why not? And that’s how it happened.”

Robert used his connections to bring in his friends such as Ray Winstone, Emma Thompson and Ashley Jensen, and got to shoot it in his hometown.

“I always thought that if I ever was going to direct a film, number one, it’d be in my home town, and number two, I was going to get my mates in,” he said.

The Legend Of Barney Thomson is in cinemas now.