Dougray Scott, who set hearts throbbing in Mission Impossible 2, is the British actor of the moment.

photo by Paul Wetherell

Scott has been focused on that date for weeks now and finds its sudden

appearance an eerie coincidence. "That's the year of the play," the actor says, referring to Nick Whitby's To the Green Fields Beyond, which opened at the Donmar Warehouse in late September. "It's also the year my father was born."

The actor, who, according to the Hollywood Reporter, is "probably the only young British star that the studios would give a leading role," will gladly, talk about his father, his work and his love for his native Scotland. But he's become so adept at avoiding controversial and personal topics that he can sound as if he took the advice Kevin Costner gave Tim Robbins in Bull Durham about doing interviews in the big leagues. Brad Pitt is "lovely, we went out for a meal"; Michael Apted is "one of the sweetest men and a wonderful director" and Tom Cruise is "a lovely, lovely man."

It's Cruise, in fact, who gets much of the credit for Scott's sudden fame after a decade of plugging away as an actor. Cruise saw Scott's performance as a cocaine-sniffing cop in the small British film Twin Towm and invited him to his house for a game of pool. Two hours later Cruise offered him the part of the villain Sean Ambrose in the blockbuster Mission Impossible 2.

Scott, 34, followed MI:2 with Apted's Enigma due out next year, opposite Kate Winslet. Then Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes (American Beauty) contacted him for To the Green Fields Beyond. The play, in which he stars as the leader of a World War I tank crew, isn't a romantic look at the war, Scott says.

"The war is horrible," he says, "but my character is impressed with all the new technology."

Although Scott is clearly confident about his abilities and his dark, brooding good looks, the laconic actor seems a bit overwhelmed by the new hype that's surrounding him. The feeling might stem from his upbringing in the rough, socialist neighborhoods of Fife, Scotland, where the normal job choice was the dockyards.

Scott wanted to be an actor since he was 15 and remembers that "people laughed their heads off " at him. As a teenager, he read Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and the play struck a chord because his late father was a refrigerator salesman. He later discovered that acting was in his blood - his father was an actor in the late Forties, and his uncle acted with a Glasgow theater company.

"The best acting my father ever did was as a salesman," Scott says in his soft Scottish burr as the car takes him from rehearsal back to his home in west London, where his wife, the casting director Sarah Trevis, and their two-year-old twins, Gabriel and Eden, await him.

"I love doing research. It's the opportunity to learn about other people's lives."

Did he give Scott any acting tips? It seems an innocuous question, but it cracks his affable mood, and for a moment his temper flares. "What, like telling me how to say my lines?" he sneers sarcastically, then snaps, "No."

Scott studied at the Welsh College of Music and Drama before landing roles in the television series "Soldier Soldier" and some forgettable Hollywood fare. Then he beat out Matt Damon for the lead opposite Drew Barrymore in Ever After and his stature rose, especially after Barrymore gushed in interviews about his good looks.

It's clear that talking about his looks is another way to get on his bad side. What does excite Scott is the craft of acting. "I love doing research," he says, as the car pulls into his neighborhood. "It's the opportunity to learn about other people's lives.

"In the end, no one ever gets an Oscar for research - who gives a f--k?" he adds philosophicalIy. "That's not why people go to see a movie. But that I why I do it."

© 2000 W magazine, Fairchild Publications Inc.