Trainspotting actor Kevin McKidd stars in the lavish TV saga Rome, about the last years of Julius Caesar’s reign. To celebrate the Blu-ray release of Rome on 16 November, Kevin spoke to DVD & Blu-ray Review about the training needed to play soldier Lucius Vorenus and how he’s now used to being covered in blood...

Question: How did you deal with being away from home for such a long period of time, making Rome?
Kevin McKidd: You just deal with it. I’ve got a wife and two young children who are not in school yet, so I was lucky that they could come out with me for big chunks of time. And I commuted a lot – I was in those Friday and Sunday night planes. It’s only a two-and-a-half hour flight so it’s doable, it’s not a nightmare. But there were times when you started to crave things. I remember I’d crave a bacon butty, a good cup of tea; all those things that you take for granted in Britain. You start to crave for eggs and chips. But then when you leave Italy you realise, “Man, this was great. How could I ever complain?”

Wasn’t there a hiatus at some point and why was that?
I think what happened was that the Bulgarian sets became flooded, so we couldn’t use them so we had to take a break anyway. HBO took the opportunity and looked at the material and decide that they needed to pump more money into it to fully realise the show as it stands at the moment. The sets were too clean, pristine, we wanted it to be much more broken down, much more colourful, much more like an Indian market. I think they put 15 million more after that. We ended up relocating all those exterior locations in Bulgaria back to Rome, we just found locations that were similar to Bulgaria locations.

How much blue screen was there?
About 90 per cent of what you see is really built. It’s a 5km-radius set, which is massive. Beyond that there would be blue screens put up, so only when your eye sees a hill or a temple in the very far distance, only at that point it becomes CGI.

Were you ever able to get so immersed in it that you felt that you really were in ancient Rome?
I’m not Daniel Day-Lewis! [Laughs] But there were moments, especially the night shoots in that set, when you get the flames going and all these people on the streets at night, I really became so immersed. And a few times in a very intense scene, between action and cut, there were moments when you get goose flesh, “Wow, we’re actually here!” Or maybe it was just sleep deprivation, I don’t know. [Laughs]

How did you start to build your character?
The obvious place to start was the army training, and we did so much work with a guy called Billy Budd, who’s become a good friend. He fought in the marines, and I worked with him in The Kingdom Of Heaven, so I already knew him a little bit. Not just about the bearing of a soldier and the way to present yourself, the way to march, but also for me, because Vorenus is a leader of men, he taught me specific techniques to win the hearts and minds of your men, to make them fight to the death for you and for each other. It’s about public speaking, honour, chivalry, care for your men – you become their father, so I was just sucking everything in as much as I could. Vorenus is nothing but that and his struggle is to come to terms with his family and civilian life, so I needed to get the army bit right.

Do you think you’d have made a good soldier?
[Laughs] No, no, no, no! I couldn’t do it for real. No way.

The class structure was very strong in Rome as it is in Britain. Did that affect your own life?
I’m from a small town in the Highlands of Scotland and my family is very much from a working class background. My parents were in the service industry, my father was a plumber and my mother worked in a secretarial office. I grew up very unaware of class because I was very removed from anywhere that people of class would live [Laughs hard]. It was only when I moved to London I started to learn about all that stuff. It’s a very sophisticated system of class in Britain, there are certain rules that you have to follow, and I think it exists here [in the States]. People say this is a classless society but I don’t believe that to be true. It’s a different class system, I haven’t quite worked it out yet because I haven’t been here for very long, but you definitely get a sense that there are rules that should be abided in this country. In ancient Rome it was so obvious that you were either hugely wealthy or ridiculously poor. Lucius Vorenus is very much me, a working class man, who because he has this deep sense of honour and the old ways he believes in, Caesar and Marc Anthony realise that they need this guy so they slowly corrupt him with money and power. During this process his family becomes nouveau riche.

Are you a strict father?
Not as strict as Vorenus. [Laughs] It’s funny, Billy Budd said to me when I was having problems with them, “All you have to say to them is: ‘You’re the one who controls the volume of my voice.’” [Laughs] That’s what Billy would say to his troops: “You be good and I will not shout.”

Did it work?
No, my kid just went, “What, what are you talking about, dad?”