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In Angela's Ashes, Carlyle plays Malachy McCourt, the alcoholic patriarch of the ultimate hard-luck Irish family. Through the course of the film, Malachy drinks away money intended for his infant children. He eventually abandons his family altogether. But Carlyle took the role with the emphatic understanding that he wasn't going to turn Malachy into a mere bad guy.
"It's wrong to make this guy the villain, to me," Carlyle says in his porridge-thick Glaswegian brogue. "The man's crime was that he was addicted to the alcohol. His second crime was that he couldn't face his responsibilities."
Carlyle's instincts about his character were confirmed, he says, when he briefly met Frank McCourt, the author whose best-selling memoir was the basis for the film.
"The one thing I asked him was, 'How do you feel about (your dad)?' and he said, 'I love him. I love him.'
"And that was all I needed to hear. The kids loved him till the day he died. They never, never had a bad word to say against him."
Carlyle, 38, had other reasons to avoid an unsympathetic performance of Malachy. In his native Glasgow, Carlyle had known his share of hard times when he was being raised by his house-painter father, Joseph Carlyle.
"It was very, very hard, very, very tough," Carlyle says, recalling times he had to wait for hours in the Scottish equivalent of a welfare office, "waiting for a box of groceries.
"It was easy for me to relate to this film," he says.
"But you'll find that even when times are hard and things are rough, and I would imagine you'll find this in most families that have lived through bad experiences, there's a pride there as well," he says. "And this is very very prominent in Malachy McCourt."
Carlyle's sympathy for the character is all the more surprising since he was abandoned, at the age of four, by his mother. Asked what happened to her, he says, "I've no interest. I don't know if she's alive. It doesn't really mean anything to me anymore.
"I don't mean to sound glib about it. I came to terms with that a long time ago when I was about 17 or 18 and I went a bit mad," he says. "We all go mad about that time, but that was the hook I hung it on."
Evidently, Carlyle got past it. He got into acting by chance at the age of 21, after an unsatisfying apprenticeship in his dad's painting trade.
He did laudable work on British TV, including a Scottish series titled Hamish Macbeth, and a turn as a vicious skinhead in an episode of Cracker. (One of his scenes opposite Robbie Coltrane was recently deemed one of the top 100 moments in the history of British television in a recent BBC special.)
A turning point was his work as the psychotic Begbie in the arthouse hit Trainspotting (although his voice ended up being dubbed to make his accent less impenetrable to North American audiences). But Carlyle truly came into his own as the leader of a troupe of amateur male strippers in the hit 1996 comedy The Full Monty.
"No one could have imagined the success that these films attained, especially The Full Monty, which went ballistic," Carlyle says.
Thus, Carlyle has moved up to the point where ... well, he's a Bond villain. Specifically, he plays a Bosnian terrorist named Renard who inflicts some damage on Pierce Brosnan's 007 in filmdom's most successful film franchise.
"It was great fun," Carlyle says. "The people who do Bond are lovely people, they really are. It's very much a family kind of atmosphere that they have there. You find out that the makeup artists have been there for 12 Bond movies, so they welcome you in."
But Carlyle hasn't gone Hollywood yet. He still lives in Glasgow with his makeup artist wife. (They met working together on Cracker.)
"I don't have any kids, but maybe that'll change next year," he says, adding that the experience of working with so many children in Angela's Ashes has changed his perspective.
"I didn't realize how much I loved children until I was surrounded by them every day," he says.
But Carlyle looks happiest when asked how his father has reacted to his success, after a tough beginning.
"Oh, yeah, he's a very happy man," he says.