Steve Pratt talks to TV's Monarch Of The Glen star Martin Compston about taking his chance to star in a New York-set movie, which needed the help of Sting and wife Trudie Styler when the project ran out of cash.

MARTIN Compston grew up going to see Celtic play and dreaming that one day he'd play for them. As a teenager, he signed to play professional football for Greenock Morton in Scotland. Then director Ken Loach saw him while casting a movie and Compston began playing a different kind of game on the screen.

"It was a big decision," he says about swapping football for film and the leading role in Sweet Sixteen, the 2002 movie shot in his home town in Inverclyde. "I was just beginning a long hard road as a footballer, and would have had to get my head down and work. But I still get a kickabout with my mates."

After three years as a regular on BBC1's Sunday night series Monarch Of The Glen, he packed his bags and made his US screen debut in A Guide To Recognising Your Saints.

He plays Mike O'Shea, a young Scottish lad with an Irish name who causes no end of confusion in writer-director Dito Montiel's memoir of growing up in the Astoria area of Queens, New York, in the 1970s.

Compston finds himself in the company of such Hollywood headliners as Robert Downey Jr, Dianne Wiest, Chazz Palminteri and Rosario Dawson in a movie that took the best ensemble and best director prizes at Sundance Film Festival, along with a critics' week award at Venice Film Festival.

The fates kept conspiring to stop the 23-year-old actor seeing the completed film. He was working when it was shown at Sundance and Venice. Then his plane was delayed when he travelled to the Toronto Film Festival screening. "So I missed the film, but made the party," he says. "I finally saw it when I was out in LA. It's a cool New York movie with a great soundtrack."

He can thank Newcastle's very own Sting for playing a part in getting the movie made. His wife Trudi Styler is one of the producers and a moving force behind the $2.4m project, which suffered several delays due to money problems. "We lost our financing twice. We were in bed with the wrong people twice, once when we were in pre-production," Trudie says.

"To lose everything and have to turn away 35 people who'd all committed to the film was tough. The third time we had friends around us who didn't say no." Among them was Sting who put money into the production, ensuring it went ahead.

She first approached Compston about the film two years before the cameras finally rolled. Monarch Of The Glen was coming to an end so the timing was perfect and it was a good way to break into US movies. "I'm lucky that kind of part came up. He's a foreign kid. He had to be someone different to stand out from the others," he says.

"I loved working in New York. That was something else for a 21-year-old. I was in my element and it was great fun. What did I like? Everything, the whole vibe of the place. It's a place that has a buzz like a capital city. There's always something going on.

"I was over there for six or seven weeks. I got there at one or two in the morning and was on set for six. Then I had three days to explore the place.

I had an apartment in the Village. It was a young cast and we all became pretty close pretty quickly. There was always something to get up to mischief with - clubs and pubs, the waterfront, jazz festivals."

He'd done bits and pieces of acting at school before Loach cast him in Sweet Sixteen. "I was 17, I hadn't been trained but I think that was definitely an advantage. You go in blind and do it," he says.

"I was very lucky to be learning on the job. You just go ahead and do it. I loved it right from the start. I love the buzz. Basically we're just playing and pretend to be kids pretending to be someone else. Sweet Sixteen opened doors for me that wouldn't have been opened otherwise. People had this notion I was this kid from the street who knew nothing about acting.

"I did three years in Monarch Of The Glen and that was my training. That was being on set every day with different actors, hitting your mark and getting on with it. It made me grow up and was completely different to Sweet Sixteen."

Now he's thinking of going out to LA again. He's been out before to go round and get his face known. "I hated it. I did about 50 meetings a day. The first time I hated the place. I lasted a week-and-a-half, packed my bags and came home. But the last time I went with a friend and really enjoyed it."

His next movie takes him to South Africa to film Doomsday, the new movie from Newcastle director Neil Marshall, following Dog Soldiers and The Ascent.

* A Guide To Recognising Your Saints (15) opens in cinemas tomorrow.