Stranger danger and other terrors

Kelly Macdonald plays a new mother desperate for her husband's attention in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

The most unactressy actress in Britain arrives late, smiles, sighs and says she's sorry. She looks flustered and as she peers at me over the restaurant table, she begins to frown. Gradually, there comes a blush. "Oh God, this is really weird, isn't it? It's like we're on a blind date, or something."

It is, of course, simply an interview over lunch. But Kelly Macdonald doesn't much like talking to strangers. She laughs with a nervousness that will not abate for the next 47 minutes.

"Sorry, I've not made a good first impression, have I? The thing is," and here her voice falls practically to a whisper, "I hate interviews. Well, not hate, exactly. Hate is such a teenage word, isn't it? It's just I'm not very good at them. Especially with people I've never met."

I tell her that we actually met once before, eight years previously, on the set of Stella Does Tricks, an independent British film in which she played a tart with a heart and a drug problem.

Back then, she seemed terrified of everything around her. For the duration of our brief chat, she shook with nerves. "I've not got much better since, to be honest," she says.

The London restaurant was chosen by Macdonald's publicist because she'd said the food was fabulous. But it seems Macdonald will not be tempted. She went to the theatre last night and on to a bar afterwards with friends to drink red wine - too much red wine.

Compounding the hangover is that this morning she had to endure a photo shoot, something she found even more tortuous than the prospect of talking to me.

Although she hates the business of promotion, Macdonald has made an exception today because her latest film, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, is one she is rather happy with.

Directed by Michael Winterbottom, who is fast becoming the most eclectic and inventive British director of his generation, it stars pretty much everyone who is anyone in British comedy - Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, David Walliams, Ronni Ancona, Stephen Fry - and is mischievously postmodern.

The film is effectively a film of the film being made, much in the same way that Laurence Stern's 18th-century novel - in which Tristram Shandy haltingly tries to tell the story of his life but is hopelessly waylaid - was a book about the business of writing a book.

Macdonald's is a supporting role: she plays Coogan's wife, lingering on set with her new baby and trying desperately to hold her husband's attention, which is otherwise occupied with the filming and a desire to have it off with one of the production assistants.

"It was chaos on set, absolute chaos," she recalls. "I've never done anything quite like it before, and so it was fascinating but made me terribly paranoid as well.

"Why? Well, Michael [Winterbottom] never really turned the cameras off, and we were continually miked up, and because so much of it was improvised, we had no idea what would make the final cut and what wouldn't.

"So I'd be having my makeup done, chatting away, and would suddenly convince myself that my conversation was being recorded and would end up on screen. Very Big Brother. And because of all the confusion, I had no idea whether the finished product would be any good. But it is. I love it."

Filming finished early last year in what was an industrious time for Macdonald. She had also completed the Emma Thompson-scripted kids' film Nanny McPhee, then promptly went on to a remake of, of all things, Lassie, alongside Peter O'Toole and Samantha Morton.

But Lassie had wrapped nine months before this interview and she had done nothing since.

How had she filled her days? She smiles, embarrassed: "Well, you know, I sleep, I get up, I watch TV, I see friends, I go to the theatre, I sleep some more ... I suppose you could say I've had a lot of downtime recently. In fact, more than a lot."

Macdonald came to prominence in 1996, with Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. The then 19-year-old actress played the schoolgirl temptress who writhed naked on top of Ewan McGregor while her parents lay sleeping in the next room.

The film became a national sensation, and made a star out of its leading actor. It didn't do badly for Macdonald, either.

"Trainspotting was definitely a lucky break, yes, perhaps the luckiest of all," she says, "but it wasn't quite the fairytale beginning that people have suggested. I was trying hard to break into acting before that came along, albeit in my own quiet way."

Born into the Glasgow suburb of Newton Mearns, Macdonald may well have harboured thespian dreams, but thought she didn't have the necessary mettle for drama school, so decided the best way to break into acting was to attend as many auditions as possible. But, she says, "I was terrible at them, I hated them."

This and a readily self-confessed lack of motivation, rather suggests that had Boyle not seen something in her when she turned up, pale-faced, to the auditions for Trainspotting, her career would never have properly got going.

But it did, and deservedly so, for she has built up a fine line in understated performances in films such as Gregg Araki's Splendour, Intermission (alongside Colin Farrell) and Robert Altman's Gosford Park. She has impressed on TV, too: first in Paul Abbott's State of Play and Richard Curtis' G8 drama, The Girl in the Cafe.

"Trouble is," she says, "I don't feel like I've had any real momentum in my career yet. You'd think that Trainspotting would have provided it but, well, it didn't. Not for me, anyway.

"Everything that has come along since has been sort of natural and gentle - and only occasionally consistent."

These extended "downtimes", as she puts it, are what make her sometimes question her choice of career.

"I enjoy what I do, of course I do, but I do fall out of love with it every so often, and mostly it's because of that whole not-working thing. It's pretty stressful and depressing.

"You know, I sometimes think that actors deserve a lot more respect than they get, if only for what they - I mean, we - go through.

"Basically, it's like turning up for hundreds of job interviews, being put through your paces, and failing to get the vast majority of them. It doesn't exactly fill you with confidence, you know?"

But Macdonald doesn't react like other actors might. When she fails an audition, she believes it to be fate: "I wasn't supposed to get it, so no harm done," runs her logic. She doesn't brood on it, and doesn't wish a crippling illness on the actress who beat her to the role. In fact, she quickly forgets that she went for the film in the first place.

"It happens all the time," she admits. "I'll be sitting in a cinema on a Saturday night, watching some or other new release, when all of a sudden a line of dialogue will seem incredibly familiar to me. And then, slowly, it dawns: I'd auditioned for this film, like, a year before, but had forgotten all about it."

The saying "water off a duck's back" could well have been coined especially for her. "It's not that I don't care," she says, "because I do. It's just that I lack ... " Motivation? "Yes, that's it. Motivation."

A couple of years ago, Macdonald married the Travis bassist Dougie Payne, but is reluctant to discuss any part of her private life.

She says they are the antithesis of a celebrity couple, that nobody ever recognises them, and she likes it that way.

They live together in London and no, they don't have any children, but may have some one day.

Her pastimes include going to the theatre, restaurants and occasionally indulging in red wine. She loves acting, and hopes to continue to do so, but believes she could do better.

"I don't push myself enough," says the woman who seems oblivious to just how competitive her chosen career is. "I don't concentrate enough, but then I've always had a problem paying attention to things.

"Maybe in Hollywood I'd have to be far more determined and aggressive, but at my level here in England, it's not really like that. Fortunately, I get by being who I am, and I like it that way. I feel I can cope with things here. Well, pretty much, anyway."

As she leaves, she offers me a final, non-specific, apology, and as she passes a waitress on her way out, she apologises to her as well.

Earlier in our conversation, she admitted that when she read her own interviews, she often failed to recognise herself. "Journalists seem to want to portray me as this scared, timid little thing, and very fragile," she said. "And that just baffles me, because I'm not like that at all."

The thing is, she is. Though always polite and desperate to please in a manner that you feel she secretly believes is beyond her, Macdonald is indeed scared, timid and fragile. That she doesn't realise this somehow makes her all the more so.

What: Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Where and when: Tonight, 6.30pm, Civic

- INDEPENDENT