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As the unemployed steelworker in The Full Monty who talks his pals into becoming male strippers, Carlyle bared much more than his soul.
Brave as that act may seem, it pales beside some of his other career choices.
In the controversial film Priest, Carlyle played the gay
hustler who has an affair with a priest, and in Trainspotting he was a vicious drunk who hangs around with a bunch of heroin addicts.
He made his film debut in 1992 in Ken Loach's Riff Raff, playing a homeless man who exploits his fellow derelicts, and a year later was a bully terrorizing street kids in Safe.
On the British TV series Hamish MacBeth, he became a popular anti-hero by playing a dope-smoking policeman.
"It's pretty obvious I never consider the consequences of my career choices or I probably wouldn't have a career," admits Carlyle.
"If I was a cautious man I certainly would never have starred in Ravenous," he adds, referring to his cannibalism movie that opens Friday in Calgary.
In Ravenous, Carlyle plays a mysterious stranger who turns up at a remote fort in the California mountains babbling about having escaped from a colony of cannibals.
He leads the soldiers to a fate they could only imagine in their worst nightmare.
"It's a wonderful, playful allegory about the California's obsessions with body image fuelled by drugs and sex.
"In Ravenous, my character is the ultimate drug pusher. He says that if you eat another person, their strengths become yours."
Carlyle is quick to point out that Ravenous is a dark, twisted comedy but concedes some people will not be able to get past the subject matter and could find it offensive.
Ravenous is the first of four movies that will feature Carlyle this year. He is also the star of the quirky caper movie Plunkett & MaCleane, the dark drama Angela's Ashes and the new James Bond movie The World is Not Enough, in which he plays the villain, a madman named Renard.
"My dad is so very proud that I am playing a Bond villain. When I was young and my dad used to take me to movies, Sean Connery was the only actor who sounded like us.
"You don't have a thick Scottish accent like I did and ever dream you could be in movies.
"When I was in drama school back in 1986, the teachers told me I'd never work unless I lost my accent.
"Now I just lose it when I want to, but I've kept it for several of my films including Trainspotting and people all over the world responded."
Carlyle was a 21-year-old house painter in Glasgow when a friend loaned him a copy of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible.
"I was a pretty political guy back then. I couldn't believe that a play could be so profound.
"On the strength of The Crucible I agreed to join the amateur theatre company my friend was in.
"It's what changed my life."