Beers as an eight-year-old with Sean Connery and Peter O’Toole. A favourite curry interrupted by Mel Gibson. Highland warriors. Serial killers. Boxing trainers. James Cosmo, 75, has done it all, and played them all. Tony Earnshaw met him.

The gruff, tough features of James Cosmo have graced our TV sets and cinema screens since the mid 1960s. As versatile as he has been ubiquitous, Cosmo garnered early film experience in the all-star Battle of Britain and Richard Attenborough’s character study Young Winston, based on Churchill’s adventures during the Boer War and beyond.

On television he earned credits such as The Stone Tape, Survivors, The Professionals, Hammer House of Horror, and The Nightmare Man.

He was nudging 50 when he was cast as the flashing eyed warrior father to Brendan Gleeson in Braveheart, Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning if historically wayward portrait of 13th century Scottish patriot William Wallace.

Since then Cosmo has clocked up an impressive filmography, equally at home on the big or small screen in everything from Trainspotting and Troy to Sons of Anarchy and Game of Thrones. Always busy. Always quality.

You seem to be always in demand. Are you working at the moment?

I’ve been filming a six-part TV series up in Glasgow called Nightsleeper, which comes out soon, for the BBC.

Are you able to say anything about it, and your role in it?

I don’t want to spoil it for you because it’s one of these programmes where you won’t know until the very end what’s actually happening. Basically it’s a night sleeper train coming down from Glasgow to London, but it gets hacked just before it leaves the station. So it takes off, and there isn’t a driver, but there’s someone with a computer somewhere in the world, which is controlling the train. There are eight characters on the train, and you don’t know if they are who they say they are, or whatever. You don’t know who the villain is, and you don’t quite find out until the very last minute.