For someone who keeps getting offered the part, Robert Carlyle does not look anything like Adolf Hitler. The Scottish-born actor stars in Hitler: The Rise Of Evil, a two-part mini-series debuting Sunday on CH and CBS.

Carlyle was in Toronto yesterday to promote the Alliance Atlantis mini-series. In person, the wiry, down-to-earth actor looks more like the working-class characters he has played in films like The Full Monty and Trainspotting. That would be right down to his jeans and cigarettes. Call me Bobby, he tells everyone. He doesn't sound like Hitler either. Carlyle speaks with a Scottish lilt that brings me back to my wee aunties. My mother was born in Hamilton, Scotland, about 18 km from Carlyle's hometown of Glasgow.

There is certainly no hint of a Scottish accent in Carlyle's astonishing portrayal of Hitler. It's not a German or Austrian sound, either. Working with dialect coach Ned Vukovic, Carlyle spoke with a British estuary dialect to set himself apart from the mid-Atlantic range of the large international cast (including Matthew Modine, Julianna Margulies, Peter O'Toole and Peter Stormare.)

Carlyle had to wear a fake nose, cheekbones and blue contacts, along with the infamous toothbrush moustache, to transform into der Fuehrer. Despite these differences, he seems to have been on everybody's short list to play him. This was the fourth production to make the pitch.

Despite the notoriety in playing the most hated man of the 20th century, Carlyle did what he always does -- read the script, liked it and took on the role.

Getting under Hitler's skin was another matter. Carlyle found a way through opera and film.

"Wagner was my way in," says Carlyle, who would listen to the German composer on his walkman while soaking in the bathtub. "I had to listen to this; it drove him," he says of Hitler. "He's a character in one of these operas, there's no doubt about it.

"Ultimately, he became the central character in one of the biggest tragedies there's ever been."

Carlyle, together with director Christian Duguay, also spent hours screening dozens of films of Hitler, everything from Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda epics to home movies taken by Eva Braun. Duguay says the home movies were especially instructive.

"You could see the point when he wanted the camera off," says Duguay. "It was scary -- you could see the monster in his eyes."

In the more intimate films, Carlyle noticed "a tightness to this guy, even in his hands. That was probably the major thing to hold on to in terms of physicality."

In the big rally scenes, where Hitler rants and spits through impassioned speeches, he's all voice and gestures. "I think he became a very good actor," says Carlyle. "He practised and rehearsed these moves and would do eight to 10 speeches a day ... (in) all the beer halls."

It's different from the politicians today, says Carlyle, although he finds British PM Tony Blair "a great hands man," he says, thrusting his fingers straight ahead. Carlyle even studied Charlie Chaplin's version of Hitler in the risky 1940 classic The Great Dictator. "There's a nod to Chaplin in there," says Carlyle. Film buffs: Look for a scene early in Part Two where Hitler is sitting in bed eating chocolates. "It's a bizarre thing we're doing here," the actor acknowledges. Carlyle doing Chaplin doing Hitler.

The film covers Hitler's rise to power, from World War I to 1934. Executive producer Peter Sussman hints he'd like to tackle a sequel. Two things stand in the way; for one, Sussman ordered all the props, from the giant Nazi flags emblazoned with swastikas to the most minute Nazi dress pins, destroyed.

"The last thing we would need is to see any of that wind up on eBay," says Sussman.

The other is Carlyle himself. At 42, he isn't sure if he's up to playing the older Hitler, who died at 56.

"Then again, never say never," says Carlyle.


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