Rake-in-Progress: Stuart Martin

Stuart Martin is all dressed up when I meet him on the set of his photoshoot in Covent Garden. His T-shirt is tucked into a pair of high-waisted, pleated trousers, giving him a classic Hollywood look that would make him the best-dressed man on any red carpet today. Fresh off completing two new projects, both released later this year, and priming himself for another production, I catch him in a moment of relative quiet.

Martin was born in Scotland and studied drama at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. Best known for Medici (in which he played a young Lorenzo opposite Dustin Hoffman as his father) as well as Jamestown and Miss Scarlet and the Duke, he’s had his fair share of historical roles. But now he’s shaking it up. He stars in Channel 4’s In Flight, a thriller involving blackmail and drug smuggling, and Atomic, in which two civilians are caught in a cartel’s bomb plot, and who must choose whether to save themselves or stop the bomb delivery. Martin lets loose as a “mental fucking Scottish guy” chasing them down in a role that promises edge-of-your seat action.

How did you start out, and where does your passion for acting come from?
I didn’t really have a plan. Weirdly it was just something I always knew I wanted to do. I didn’t do it at school. I’m from a town in Scotland, about an hour from Glasgow, and we didn’t know any actors. My parents, family — nobody’s in that game there. Anytime I’d ask people at school, like a teacher, I’d build up the confidence to say, ‘I’d quite like to do this’. And they were like, ‘Don’t be silly. Don’t be daft.’ So it wasn’t until the final year of school where I decided I really did want to do this. I did drama, went to college, and then went to drama school after that.

So you didn’t have any acting role models, or people to draw from in your town?
No, but I was obsessed with film. I think that’s something I’ve probably realised as I’ve got a bit older. I’m definitely quite obsessive. Now it sounds like a negative word, but I think you have to have that in a creative or artistic field because, like any job, it can be tough. So you have to have that thing that makes you keep going at it.

But I loved going to our local cinema and getting lost in a film. You get that theatre of it, heading down the corridor where you can feel the boom of another cinema screen. And it always gave me a buzz when I came out of a film. So, you know, there was nothing else I wanted to do.

What or who were your inspirations growing up?
I used to go to Blockbuster and get any British indie, especially Scottish, Danny Boyle, Film Four, you know, every Ewan McGregor film. I would see all that, Shallow Grave, A Life Less Ordinary, and track down anything with Robert Carlyle.

What do you look for in a script today?
It’s that gut feeling when you first read something that just makes sense. There’s an emotional reaction to it. You can’t put it down. And those jobs, especially now with kids and family, is the feeling that you can’t not do this. You know that it might mean going away from your family for four months. Certainly, during Covid, it was not being able to get home, or you might be in the States and the job doesn’t allow you to fly home, so you can’t be unsure on whether you love it or not.

Do you care if other people like your work?
In the end you want people to like your work, but as long as I like it, whether people like it or not, it doesn’t affect me. It’s like, ‘It’s a shame you don’t like it but I love it, so that’s O.K.’ You can’t change or have any input on other people’s opinion on it, and it comes down to taste. There’s a great comfort in that, that as long as I love the thing, when I first read it and go, ‘This is fucking brilliant, I love it’. That’s just my taste, that’s my opinion, and whether your mum likes it, I can’t do jobs based on that.

You’ve got a couple of pretty big projects this year. What is In Flight about?
It is about Jo, who is played by Katherine Kelly, who’s phenomenal in it. At the start of the series her 20-year-old son has been locked up in a prison in Sofia for a crime that he may or may not have committed, and then she’s trying to get him out. But very early on in episode one, a gang blackmails her into running drugs. So it’s a great thriller, written by Mike Walden, who’s fantastic, and it’s shot beautifully by Jan Jonaeus, this phenomenal cinematographer who’s very filmic. It’s a really gripping thriller.

I’m a gang member, but all is not as it seems. I would say there are twists and turns. It was a really brilliant script, because I think very often with thrillers they’re stylised, whereas this has a style but it’s very character-led and character-driven.

And you’ve got Atomic coming up, too, which sounds interesting...
It’s lovely to do characters, and then [in] the next job, my feeling is always to want to do something totally different. So if you’ve done something that’s quite tied up, it’s lovely to go, ‘Right, now I’m going to be this mental fucking Scottish guy’. It’s basically a road movie that goes across the desert where we have an atomic weapon, a dirty bomb, that has ended up in one of their hands. And then these two guys get flung together, and they have to get it across while being chased by a mad Scottish special ops guy, plus some Russian gang members, plus the C.I.A. and all sorts of different people that are trying to track down this dirty bomb.

But it’s this kind of buddy road movie between Alfie Allen and Shazad Latif, and then these other mad characters come into it. It was lovely filming in Morocco, in the desert, getting to be a bit fucking dirty and a bit Scottish. There’s a great writer called Gregory Burke, who I love. I worked with him 15 years ago on a brilliant play called Black Watch, so it was really nice to work with him again.