Toe to toe with Jamie Sives as the Scottish star trains at Lochend Boxing Club and talks Guilt, Crime, Annika and The Last Manhunt with Jason Momoa

With recent projects including Scottish TV dramas Guilt, Annika and Crime, and Western The Last Manhunt with Jason Momoa, Jamie Sives has never been busier. The Edinburgh-born actor talks to Janet Christie about how he picks projects and the release and discipline he finds training at the Lochend Boxing Club

When Jamie Sives was about to walk out of the door of his drama school for the last time, the principal said to him, ‘hmmm, wonderful character actor Jamie, but you’re never going to work’.

“That was the parting shot!” says the Edinburgh actor, who has proven him wrong by working consistently in the 24 years since, most recently hitting our TV screens in Guilt, Crime, Annika and Too Close.

Before that there was Game of Thrones (Jory Cassel) and Chernobyl, The Victim and Frontier with Jason Momoa. And films that include Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, Clash of the Titans, Valhalla Rising, Hallam Foe, On a Clear Day, It’s a Wonderful Afterlife, Triage with Colin Farrell, A Woman in Winter, One Last Chance, Frozen, Love and Other Disasters, Last Chance Harvey, Mean Machine, Wild Rose and the yet to be released The Last Manhunt, Jason Momoa’s Western. He’s also turned his hand to directing a short he wrote called Song (2014) a satisfyingly dark two-hander with Aiden Gillen and Darrell D’Silva.

Edinburgh actor Jamie Sives at Lochend Boxing Club, Edinburgh. Thank you to Terry and Jacky McCormack, at Lochend Boxing Club.

While Sives has seen the TV and film work roll in, he’s not just a star of the screen. Over his career he’s trodden the boards in everything from Hedda Gabler to the James plays at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2014, starring opposite Sofie Gråbøl, spewed fire and brimstone as John Knox in Glory on Earth in 2017 and was the first person to play the lead role of Marty Ferrara in the much-belated world premier stage adaptation of blue-collar champion Arthur Miller’s The Hook in 2015, which saw reviewers likening his “dark and brooding” performance to that of “a young Russell Crowe or even Stallone.”

“Yeah, I’m keeping the kettle boiling,” he says, laidback and smiling, not one to blow his own trumpet yet quietly ambitious all the same.

We’re talking at Lochend Boxing Club where Sives, who grew up round the corner, has been going to train for years, ever since it was opened by his friend Terry McCormack and wife Jacky nearly 15 years ago.

“Sometimes there’s 50-60 kids in here, all training hard and it’s really amazing to watch,” says Sives. Terry’s turned the community around. He and his wife Jacky have done such amazing work here.”

Edinburgh actor Jamie Sives. Thank you to Terry and Jacky McCormack, at Lochend Boxing Club.

We’re surrounded by punch bags and photographs of boxers ranging from Ken Buchanan to the current undisputed light-welterweight champion Josh Taylor who started out at the club, and Sives looks very much at home.

“I just love the training,” he says. “The boxing gym is my favourite way of keeping fit, that or running, but depending on what’s happening in life, sometimes I’m not doing it enough. It helps mentally too and the weeks that I go without doing anything I just know that it affects me.”

“I’ve never had a bout in my life or boxed competitively. I’ve sparred a lot, mainly with friends and I love that. Bombs could be dropping outside and you would not care. You’ve just got total focus on the guy that’s gonna hit you. It’s an amazing discipline.

“Sometimes people say you must have shit yourself working with whoever - any of the few big famousy-famous people I’ve worked with - and I say I’ve been in the ring with Terry McCormack. Acting with some very famous actors is nothing in comparison to getting hunted in the ring and punched by Terry McCormack.”

Edinburgh actor Jamie Sives at Lochend Boxing Club, Edinburgh. Thank you to Terry and Jacky McCormack, at Lochend Boxing Club.

Despite Covid, Sives has been busy, he’s embarrassed to say. He spent the first lockdown in Brighton where he lives when he’s not in Scotland, running along the prom and coastline. Then when the first restrictions were lifted he did Too Close (starring Emily Watson) then came up to Scotland to do Guilt 2 (with Mark Bonnar for BBC Scotland) followed by Annika (with Nicola Walker, for Alibi), and Irvine Welsh’s TV adaptation of Crime with Dougray Scott and Ken Stott.

“So I was almost 12 months on the bounce,” he says. “In 24 years or whatever it’s been, that’s the most continuous work I’ve had. But I knew guys that just packed in acting, especially those dependent on theatre work. It was awful. Still is awful. Covid’s had a devastating effect on my profession and the arts in general. I was lucky.”

Prior to this Sives was in the desert at Joshua Tree in south-east California, filming with his friend Jason Momoa (they met on Game of Thrones in which Sives played Jory Cassel then worked together in the Canadian fighting fur trappers series Frontier) on the Aquaman’s own project, a Western called The Last Manhunt which has just secured distribution.

Momoa produced and appears, with Christian Camargo directing, the film set in 1909 in the dying days of the Old West. It follows the story of Willie Boy, a native American desert runner [they could run up to 100 miles a day with messages and information] from the Chemehuevi people of southeastern California and western Arizona. Willie Boy falls in love with the daughter of a tribal leader who bans the union and is accidentally shot, then the couple flee, pursued by a sheriff and his mounted posse.

Actors Mark Bonnar and Jamie Sives filming Guilt in Glasgow's Merchant City.

A retelling of the story in the 1969 film Tell them Willie Boy was Here starring Robert Blake, Robert Redford and Katharine Ross, based on the novel by Harry Lawton, in turn based on the oral history of the Chemehuevi tribe, it is a very different film.

“I’ve watched some old Westerns and they’re so un-PC it’s incredible. I mean there’s obviously derogatory language in this one because it’s authentic in that sense. But Jason’s Native American, Hawaiian, so he went and spoke to the local elders as it were and got their blessing for it, because it is a Native American story about two Native American kids who are being pursued by a white posse. It’s still a mystery whether Willie Boy was killed or not, that’s part of the intrigue, so the film leaves it unresolved.”

Sives plays one of the posse, Ben De Crevecouer.

“It’s the last time a posse pursued a fugitive into the desert in the old Wild West way because by 1909 there was a police force. The posse is made up of guys whose dads told stories of chasing and lynching Native Americans so they want to do this one last hurrah. They’re a rum bunch and not very good so they get led this merry dance by the desert runner who ran for 600 miles or so. The horses were exhausted, they were exhausted, and it was a really, really bad idea, chasing this kid in the desert, but they just desperately wanted to be in a posse. It was just quite pathetic.”

Always open to a variety of roles, Sives relished the opportunity to be in a Western.

"Yeah, there aren’t many Scottish guys in a Western are there? Doing a Western was a huge highlight for me. It was amazing. And I got to ride horses.”

Jamie Sives as Dougie Gillman in Irvine Welsh's TV adaptation of Crime (2021), with Sarah McCardie, Dougray Scott, Joanna Vanderham, Ken Stott and Michael Abubakar.

Sives had learnt to ride after drama school and had time to kill, which led to making a yoghurt advert for French TV.

“I got this big Andalusian horse to ride. It was brilliant. They were firing cannons at me and I had to gallop over this field and jump over drawbridges. It was great. Then I did a Dr Who on a horse, and then Game of Thrones on a horse, and so I went to The Last Manhunt and they were like ‘you’re Scottish, where’d you learn to ride? When were horses introduced to Scotland?’ I’m like ‘about 600 years before you lot got them, you doughnut.” He smiles.

“It’s Romeo and Juliet in the desert, that’s what it is, star-crossed lovers being blamed for the death of her dad and we go after them and it’s all miscommunication that ends in tragedy. I think the posse are interesting because we are a rum bunch put together, we’re quite funny, quite inadequate.”

Which brings us to Dougie Gillman, the rogue detective Sives played in Crime, Irvine Welsh’s TV adaptation of his 2008 novel, another rum ‘un, on the side of the law but happy to break the rules.

“He’s no a bad lad,” says Sives, not being serious. “He comes good in the end doesn’t he?”

Not really, no.

“He still knows what’s right and wrong and who needs a good leathering,” he says and laughs.

“He’s like a 70s cop, the complete antithesis of a cop doing the right thing and following procedure. There’s nothing cop-like about Dougie Gillman, nothing I had to research for it. And he’s so larger than life I couldn’t make him just a regular homicide, so I just wanted to go really full tilt Irvine Welsh with him, you know.”

“I said to Irvine, ‘if I’m going to do this I don’t want it to be sanitised at all or it will just lose the impact, and I don’t mind if I get subtitled and no-one else does. Complaints? Just go for it, not sanitise any of the language, not clean it up, just keep him completely full on.

“I heard Irvine on a podcast the other night saying Jamie’s a mate and I’m from Leith as well, but I can’t understand a word he says in it. But I just didn’t want to be cleaned up at all and that was one of the conditions of doing it.”

Are there any elements of himself in Dougie Gillman I ask, expecting him to say no, but he comes back with, “Well yes, absolutely, because that’s how I used to talk. Not with the sentiment behind it, but it’s taken from a lot of guys that I hear regaling people in the pub. I wanted to make him quite big and animated because guys in the pub talk with their hands and they tap you all the time. It’s just pure Lochend/Leith so there’s a lot of me in there, but not the sentiment.”

If Gillman was good fun for Sives, so was McTaggart in Frontier, a former alehouse owner and dependable psychotic, who joins the Black Wolf posse in their bid to beat the Hudson Bay Company, and the show is up there as one of his favourites to make.

“A lot of it is influenced by the nature of the job, the location, the people on the job, casting crew, directors, so it’s not necessarily the role. But I enjoyed that one, being with Jason [Momoa] and working in Canada. It was an amazing experience. We were out in the snow in Western Newfoundland, on snow cats and it was just great fun, a great experience. That’s why I take jobs. If the people I’m working with are people I like and I like the thought of working with them, I’ll take a punt. When I meet directors and stuff if I don’t think I’m going to have fun, I just don’t do it. I’m too old for that. I’m not going to spend six weeks with a wanker. It’s as simple as that.”

Chernobyl was another positive experience which saw him working with his old friend and hero the late Paul Ritter.

“I loved doing that. I went out to Vilnius in Lithuania and spent most of that with dear, dear, dear Paul Ritter [Harry Potter, Friday Night Dinners]. We would go out for buckets of pasta and glasses of wine of an evening and just chat away. He was the best British actor of his generation by a country mile. Absolutely amazing and a good friend. I was a big fan of Mickey Rourke, when he was Mickey Rourke and De Niro and stuff, but Paul Ritter knocks spots off any of them.”

“I just knew Chernobyl was going to be amazing, making it, because sometimes you can’t really tell, but it was so rich and dense.

“It was shot in an old disused nuclear station that takes 50-100 years to decommission fully so it had a skeleton crew just taking us down into the bowels. We had to go into ante rooms on various levels and strip off naked and just sit. It took an hour to get into the bowels of this old reactor to film and then an hour to get out. It was quite full on but just an amazing experience with amazing people.”

Sives isn’t one to get starstruck but made an exception when he found himself sitting next to Steve Van Zandt, of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, Little Steven and The Disciples of Soul and The Sopranos and Lilyhammer fame.

“I was in New York with my mate and went to dinner with his manager and his wife. The four of us sat down at a table of six and I said ‘who are the two other seats for?’ and they said ‘oh Steve Van Zandt’s coming with his wife’. I was like a pig in shite. He sat down next to me and I was just tugging his sleeve saying ‘what’s Edie Falco like?’ and ‘what’s Bruce Springsteen like?’. Then he invited us to this little speakeasy the following night to watch Jerry Lee Lewis doing a gig to just a handful of people, but my mate said we’d promised to go and see his friend doing Richard III at a church in the Upper West Side. So I ended up watching this guy limp around the stage with Great Balls of Fire going through my head. I really regret it.”

“Then I met him again cos he came to London to the premiere of this film TelStar: the Joe Meek Story that my mate was in and he sat next to me in the cinema and I was like, this doesnae happen twice does it? Still tugging his sleeve…”

While The Last Manhunt awaits a release date, what’s ahead for Sives?

“I don’t know. I’ll see if there’s any recurring stuff that might come up next year.”.

He’s referring to Guilt, Neil Forsyth’s dark comedy drama, in which he plays Jake, brother to Mark Bonnar’s Max, and Annika, the crime drama with Nicola Walker, which sees him leaping into lochs and driving RIBs at high speed in the Clyde.

Surely Guilt will be back?

“I hope so. Nothing’s been commissioned yet and if it is, that might be at best the end of the year or 2023.”

As for Annika, the detective series set in the Inverclyde marine crime unit which ended with the bombshell that DS Andrews is the unwitting father of her child, Sives says: “It’s interesting to see where that would go if we do another one,” adding “having a AAA pass to scream up and down Inverclyde on a very fast RIB was tremendous fun but the best thing is to spend so much time in the company of Nicola Walker.”

In the meantime Sives is keeping himself fit at the boxing gym, ready to throw himself into the next role that comes along whatever that may be.

“I need to keep fit. It’s an actor’s life. You’ve got to nowadays, all these young bucks running about all bristling muscles. I heard Ken Stott giving an interview and they asked if he had advice for up and coming actors and he said ‘try and take one acting class a week just to keep your hand in and go to the gym ten times a week’, because that’s what they look for now.” He laughs.

He might be fighting fit, but if Sives were to sum up what kind of actor he is, what would he say?

“Chancer,” he says, and laughs. “I’d say I’m a chancer.”

Thank you to Terry and Jacky McCormack at Lochend Boxing Club, 112 Sleigh Drive, EH7 6EN Edinburgh, 07817 470304, [email protected]

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