Ringing true

He is far happier playing a Hobbit than playing rugby, but that didn't stop the Lord of the Rings star when a charity for carers asked him to get involved. Billy Boyd tells JIM GILCHRIST why it is a cause close to his own heart

NAPOLEONIC era Jack Tar, 21st-century house-clearance man, Stone of Destiny hijacker and, of course, Hobbit … Billy Boyd is a man of many parts, but prop-forward isn't one of them. How was it, then, that the slight-framed Glasgow actor and musician recently found himself rudely elevated by hefty rugby types in a line-out at Boroughmuir RFC's ground in Edinburgh?

In fairness, Boyd's rugby involvement involves no scrums. The Glasgow-born actor, whose role as Pippin the Hobbit in the epic film trilogy Lord of the Rings brought him international stardom, is an "ambassador" for the Princess Royal Trust for Carers, who will benefit from proceeds raised by the Capital Sevens rugby tournament to be hosted by Boroughmuir at Meggetland on Sunday.

Boyd is currently working in Los Angeles and won't be able to attend the event, but earlier this year he visited Meggetland to meet some of the players and publicise the event's charity role. "They chose me for my upper body strength," he chortles on the phone from LA. "No, seriously, what happened was John Amabile (the interior designer, of 60-Minute Makeover fame] called me up one day and said they were looking for some people to give out awards at a carers' evening, and I said yeah."

Caring for family members is a resonant topic for the 39-year-old. His sister, Margaret, formerly manager of a hairdressing salon, is now a professional carer, having spent some years caring for their grandmother, who had raised Boyd and his sister after both their parents died within a year of each other during the actor's early teens. "So I know at first hand – as most people do, I think – someone who is involved with caring for some relative," he says. "Everybody's got an uncle who looks after his wife or knows a woman who is looking after a child with learning difficulties, but people don't really talk about it, so that's why I got more involved."

Boyd's last experience of rugby was when he was filming Peter Jackson's monumental screen epic in New Zealand. "Viggo (Mortensen, who played Aragorn] got very involved with the stuntmen because he was working with them so much, so there was a lot of testosterone going around," he recalls. "It became a sort of game that if you saw someone you tried to rugby tackle them. For a couple of weeks you had to watch your back."

From the background, during our conversation, comes much excited squealing from his two-year-old son, Jack, who is watching Sesame Street in the apartment that Boyd and his partner, Ali McKinnon, have rented in Los Angeles. He is working there on a film script with his friend and fellow-Hobbit, Dominic Monaghan, who played his partner-in-mischief, Merry, in the Oscar-winning film trilogy. "We've both got some time off just now, so we thought we'd try and work away on it with some writers and producers, and it seems to be coming along quite well." The plot concerns "a couple of British guys ending up in America, sort of accidentally, and their trials and tribulations … almost harking back to the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road To …movies. Sort of surreal." Hope-Crosby choruses of "We're Morocco bound" come to mind, the pun a roundabout reminder that long before Boyd found himself donning hairy feet to play a Hobbit, and before he'd even entered the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama at the relatively late age of 24, he'd lived another life, spending seven years in another life as a bookbinder. The experience seems to have given him a certain grounding, both in terms of life-training for a youth who had lost both parents, and in maintaining an engaging mix of down-to-earthness and youthful enthusiasm, despite the heady accoutrements of Hollywood fame.

"There used to be a thing in the drama colleges – although I don't think there is any more – that you had to be 19 or 20 to get in. I think that's a bad idea, because having some life experience and things to draw on to create real characters is what the job (acting] is about. So I'm really glad I went to drama school when I did. I felt like I knew why I was there. The bookbinding was a good time in my life. I did a lot of growing up and, with my parents passing away, to go into a factory and sit with these older men and get a lot of wisdom and life skills was a good thing."

Boyd's father died of lung cancer when Billy was just 13, his mother of a heart attack a year later. He has said that he would have loved to have been able to take his parents to some of his premieres, and he still misses them – "Obviously. I don't know what life is like as a 20-year-old with parents. I never got to know what it was like to go for a pint with my dad, or take my mum to an opening or anything like that. But you play the life you get dealt." The imparting of wisdom had its part in his screen relationship with Gregor Fisher in the recent whimsical BBC2 Scotland Comedy Empty, in which they played a pair of council-house clearance men: Fisher the older and ostensibly more worldly wise of the two; Boyd a younger and cynical type whose marriage is crumbling. He points out, however, that the on-screen relationship was not all that it initially seemed, in terms of who was educating whom. "I liked the scripts when I read them," he recalls, "and thought it would be a great chance to work with Gregor Fisher, so we went out and had dinner and talked about it and we seemed to be coming from the same place. I had a great time working with him. He's one of the most giving and in-the-moment actors I've worked with."

Boyd also relished filming back in Glasgow, where he now lives in the city's West End with McKinnon. A dancer, she was introduced to him when he went to watch two of his pals, Paul Riley and Mark Cox (of Still Game) playing in a panto in the King's Theatre, in which she was appearing.

As well as Lord of the Rings, he took a leading role in the acclaimed Napoleonic War naval drama Master and Commander, with Russell Crowe, while subsequent ventures have included On A Clear Day (with Peter Mullan) and The Flying Scotsman biopic about the cyclist Graeme Obree. Widely reported plans for him to play a leading role in a film version of Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy seem to have come to nothing: "A pity, that. It was quite a nice script. I don't think there has really been a film that kind of captured that time in Scotland, with the whole rave culture and stuff. It was an interesting idea but I think a lot of it was just talk."

Boyd appears in a couple of forthcoming films, the confidence-trickster comedy Save Angel Hope, and Glenn, concerning a pianist obsessed with the eponymous Canadian maestro Glenn Gould. However, the film that should attract most interest in this neck of the woods is the forthcoming Stone of Destiny, directed by actor-director Charles Martin Smith and starring Robert Carlyle and Kate Mara. In it Boyd plays Bill Craig, one of the enterprising Scottish nationalist students involved in deftly retrieving the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1950.

In the meantime Boyd – who first trod the boards in a school production of Oliver! on the Cranhill housing estate in which he grew up – says he'd like to do more theatre. "It's been a few years since I did any theatre, I hope to get something going there."

What seems to be exercising him most at the moment, however, is his Glasgow-based rock band, Beecake. Playing in such entertainingly diverse venues as Harris and Los Angeles (and scheduled to appear at July's Wicker Man festival near Kirkcudbright), Boyd is the band's frontman, singing in a surprisingly mellifluous tenor voice. "It's doing good," he says with enthusiasm. "This time last year we were out in Los Angeles and did some gigs. And there's a couple of studios we've been to see, because we're trying to get an album done."

It's tempting to regard the band as another manifestation of Boyd's rootedness, in that he went to school with its guitarist and keyboard player, Billy Johnston, and also knows drummer John Crawford from his youth. He had played with them in a band called Foreign Country, way back in the days before acting college and Middle Earth, and a night spent reminiscing over a bottle of malt whisky got them on the road again.

He has travelled an eventful road since those days in Cranhill and Ruchazie, he agrees, though he remains unfazed about it. Lord of the Rings, it goes without saying, had an immense impact on his career and profile. "That put me on an international stage, or whatever, but even before that, just doing theatre in Scotland … I was pretty happy doing that as well. Just getting the chance to do a job that you want to do, I think in our line you have to keep reminding yourself of that. You can get carried away, wondering what part you're going to get next but then you just sit back and think, 'You know what? I'm getting paid to do what I wanted to do,' and there's not many people can say that."

His time spent in New Zealand making the Rings trilogy instilled in him a love of surfing, which he still pursues, both in Scotland and California, where he'd been out riding the waves the week before our conversation. "Scotland's a bit colder," he laughs. "Not so much the water, but the air, when you come out and you're getting changed and it's raining, or snowing even. But there's not a lot of people in the water." Rugby, however, looks likely to remain a non-starter, apart from any ambassadorial obligations.

• The Princess Royal Trust for Carers Capital Sevens are at Meggetland, Edinburgh, on Sunday.

BEST OF BOYD

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) The Two Towers (2002) The Return of the King (2003)

Peter Jackson's epic trilogy of Tolkien's tale brought the Glasgow actor stardom as the mischievous Pippin the Hobbit. Boyd remains friends with many of the "Fellowship".

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

This Napoleonic nautical drama saw Boyd take on the role of the ship's coxswain, Barrett Bonden, to Russell Crowe's Captain Jack Aubrey, as they played cat-and-mouse with a French frigate.

The Flying Scotsman (2006)

Douglas Mackinnon's biopic of the Scottish cycling champion Graeme Obree and his battle with depression. Boyd played the troubled pedaller's self-appointed manager, friend and motivator, Malky McGovern.