FAST-RISING film star Dougray Scott spent nine months getting in shape for his spectacular on-screen fights with Tom Cruise in Mission: Imposible 2.

The former Welsh College of Music and Drama student plays bad guy Sean Ambrose in the all-action blockbuster, which culminates with an eye-popping bike chase and beach fight between rogue IMF agent Ambrose and Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt.

“I first met Tom Cruise and director John Woo in July 1998, when they asked me to do the movie,” said 34-year-old Scott, before Tuesday night’s star-studded premiere of the film in Leicester Square.

“Then Tom looked at me and went, ‘Yeah, you’ll need to work out in the gym.’ So I went off and spent about nine months building up, and I put on about two stone in muscle.

“I had to be really fit because the whole thing about the movie, and especially the end sequence, is that the audience has to believe that my character is equally as strong, both mentally and physically, as Tom’s character.

“If you come to that end sequence and think it’s obvious who’s going to win, that’s not so exciting - but at least at some point the audience will be thinking, ‘My God, he’s really strong’.”

Three years ago, the most glamorous film work Scott could find was pounding Swansea’s backstreets as a bent copper in the low-budget comedy Twin Town, co-starring Rhys Ifans.

Now he’s poised for global recognition playing the big Mr Evil in the Hollywood blockbuster of the year, and he did plenty of his own stunts in the process.

“There was a race track just north of Sydney (Australia, where M:I 2 was mostly filmed) with motorbikes, so I trained there,” said Fife-born Scott, now poised to become Scotland’s most successful young film actor alongside Ewan McGregor.

“It wasn’t so much that Tom inspired me, it was what they asked me to do.

“They said would I get on the bike? So I just had to train for it, and I got really good at bike-riding. I even went through the wall of flames on a bridge.

“It was risky stuff, some of it, but I’m a physical person as well, so I get a kick out of doing action stuff as much as Tom does, although I’m not quite as mad as he is. You wouldn’t get me up that mountain with one safety wire, not a chance.”

Scott has since lost that pumped-up look while he is currently in Britain filming the wartime thriller Enigma, based on the Robert Harris novel and co-starring Kate Winslet.

Scott’s character is “maths geek” hero Tom Jericho, who worked at Bletchley during World War II, helping to break the Germans’ Enigma code.

Despite his surging big-screen career Scott looks back fondly at his time in Cardiff, where he learnt his craft.

“The reason I went there was because I didn’t have any money,” he said.

“I couldn’t get a grant to go to London, because a lot of the acting colleges were private and really expensive, so I got a grant to the Welsh College of Music and Drama.

“I wanted to move out of Scotland, to get some fresh experience. I had a great time, I loved Wales and I love Cardiff, I made a lot of great friends there.”

He became particularly friendly with Rhys Ifans while making Twin Town. Now both their careers have truly taken off into new dimensions.

“I occasionally see Rhys, but he’s quite hard to track down,” he laughed.

The over-extended shooting schedule of Mission: Imposible 2 meant that Scott had to turn down the role of Wolverine in another of this summer’s much-anticipated Hollywood blockbusters, X-Men. But he says he has no regrets.

“I couldn’t do X-Men because M:I 2 took longer to complete than any of us expected,” said Scott, whose home is in London with his partner Sarah and their two-year-old twins Gabriel and Eden.

“At the end of the day, I was not worried, because M:I 2 is such an extraordinary film, and it was worth the wait. There is no negativity.

“Yes, of course there was a bit of disappointment, but Fox had already waited three months for me, and they couldn’t wait any more.

“John (Woo, director of MI:2) and Tom (Cruise) did everything to help me, but in the end, we just couldn’t finish our scenes in time. C’est la vie.

“Had I done X-Men, I probably couldn’t have done Enigma, so it’s all swings and roundabouts. And I’m having an amazing time filming Enigma.”

Woo admitted last night that he was shaking with fear when he first met Sir Anthony Hopkins, who has a cameo in M:I 2 as Ethan Hunt’s boss and mentor. But the Welsh superstar calmed Woo with his gentlemanly behaviour.

Hopkins, whose name does not feature in the film’s opening or closing credits, joined the production at the eleventh hour to film his one scene with Tom Cruise - where he says the movie’s most memorable line, “This isn’t mission difficult, Mr Hunt, it’s Mission Impossible.”

Woo, whose last film was the box office smash Face/Off, said, “Just one week before we started shooting the scene, we originally wanted another actor for that role, but there were scheduling problems and he cancelled.

“All of a sudden, I got a call from our producer Paula Wagner and she said, ‘We’d like Anthony Hopkins to play the role.’ I was shocked, I was panicking, and I said, ‘No, that will be impossible.’

“But then Mr Hopkins explained that he liked Mission Impossible, he liked Tom Cruise, and that he’d like to work with me, so he wouldn’t mind doing it as a cameo.

“When he arrived on the set, I was shaking. I said, ‘Mr Hopkins, what did you think about this scene?’ and so on.

“He said, ‘Please, call me Tony.’ He was such a gentleman, so humble and so nice to everybody.

“He was so happy to be in the scene that he didn’t question anything. He just wanted to be part of the movie. I learnt a lot from him, I’m so grateful.”

• Mission: Impossible 2 opens nationwide on Friday MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 marks the latest high in the life of a director born to poverty but currently the toast of Hollywood.

John Woo was born Yusen Wu in Guangzhou, South China in 1946, but migrated to Hong Kong with the rest of his family when he was four years old.

In 1967, he formed a student film group to discuss ideas for experimental and ground breaking films with new producers. He was an assistant director at Shaw Brothers film company from 1971 to 1972 and struck out on his own the following year to direct his first film, The Young Dragons.

He followed up his debut with a series of comedy and swordfighting films, and in 1986 he produced the violent gangster film A Better Tomorrow with Tsui Hark. The film revived the career of actor Di Lung and made a star out of Chow Yun Fat.

With its elaborate action scenes, A Better Tomorrow would confirm Woo’s reputation for the use of violence in his films. He went on to make films such as The Killer and Hard Boiled, before he was spotted by Hollywood, and moved to the United States.

He became the first Asian director to make a Hollywood film with his 1993 debut Hard Target starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Lance Henriksen.

In 1995 he directed Broken Arrow the all-action thriller about nuclear weapons starring John Travolta and Christian Slater. He teamed up again with Travolta in the dark thriller Face/Off which also starred Nicholas Cage, and went on to become a worldwide blockbuster.

Woo is renowned for his all-action films with spectacular stunts and special effects. A number of themes have become commonplace in Woo’s films.

Often the violence is contrasted with pleasant music and the action is heavily choreographed, using slow motion or freeze frame sequences. Flashbacks and the use of reflections to alert characters to dangerous situations are trademarks of his work.

Among his admirers are directors Martin Scorsese, Sam Rami and Quentin Tarantino. Rami has compared Woo’s talent for action scenes to Alfred Hitchcock’s ability to create suspense. Quentin Tarantino, whose films Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, True Romance and From Dusk Till Dawn contain graphic scenes of violence, was once told by a studio executive that Woo “could direct action scenes.”

“Sure,” replied the feted director, “And Michaelangelo can paint ceilings.”

©2000 Western Mail & Echo Ltd 
06/07/2000