Rap created for audition by Outlander star to feature in James McAvoy film
The film is to close Glasgow Film Festival
The star of a film about two Scottish rappers directed by James McAvoy has told how a song he “scribbled” as part of the audition process has ended up on the film’s soundtrack.
Seamus McLean Ross, the son of Deacon Blue musicians Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh, plays Gavin in California Schemin', which tells the story of Silibil N’ Brains - a pair of rappers from a Dundee council estate who pretended to be American to break into the music industry - and ended up touring with Eminem.
The film, which is McAvoy’s directorial debut, is to close the Glasgow Film Festival next month.
Mc Lean Ross, who plays the younger version of Colum MacKenzie in Outlander spin off Blood of My Blood, said he had received an email from McAvoy telling him to make up his own rap as part of the call back for the casting of the film.
He also said he empathised with the rappers' situation, saying he had felt some discrimination against his Scottish accent when studying in London at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. The vast majority of his parts, including Outlander, Rebus and Payback, have been filmed in or based in Scotland.
“I’ve not left Glasgow since I was at drama school,” he joked. “I think it’s changed a lot, there’s so much being filmed here and so much appetite for Scottish stories. But growing up, our accent was still an issue. It’s complex. I try to be a bit of a chameleon, I’m quite good at being a middle class English boy for parts, that’s the job of an actor.
"[In London], there was still a bit of a feeling that you couldn't do Shakespeare in your own voice, even though Macbeth is meant to be a Scottish play.
“But for musicians, it’s about being real. They felt ‘you don’t understand the culture, you don’t understand the game’. But Eminem, people like that have credibility for being themselves and that’s what the rap game is about. If you’re not doing that, what are you doing, are you really a rapper? There’s quite a lot of questions about identity in the film and that’s quintessential with Scotland.”
For the first audition for California Schemin’, McLean Ross, who stars in the film alongside BAFTA nominee Samuel Bottomley as Billy, had had to choose an existing rap song and perform it, but when he got a call back, he received an email.
He said: “It just said ‘James would like you to write your own rap and perform it at the audition,’ and I was just like, ‘oh God’. I sat there and scribbled something down and then it turns out it gets put in the movie.”
He said he had been given free rein to write the rap, but had been inspired by a part of the script.
He said: “There’s a scene on the bus, where Gavin isn’t in the best of shape. He’s rapping something down the phone and that was my work. The premise was that he’s talking about Billy and it was just something daft, something about the script that I connected with. I thought about Billy and Gavin wanting to hang out with him - and came up with these mad scenarios they would be in.
“It epitomises what the film is about, seeing Gavin seeing himself in the stars.”
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