Angus Macfadyen Braveheart (1995)
Angus Macfadyen was twenty-eight when he shot Braveheart and three years out of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. The role of Robert the Bruce was his first major film credit; he had done television (Crown Prosecutor, The Lost Language of Cranes) and a few stage parts at the Royal Court. He played the Bruce arc — the privately committed pledge at Edinburgh,b27 the Falkirk visor-lift,b32 the "You lied!" scream at his father,b37 the Bannockburn turnb40 — and the character became, by the film's end, the one whose conversion the entire post-midpoint structure is aimed at.
Born in Glasgow, raised on three continents
Macfadyen was born in Glasgow in 1963; his father worked for the World Health Organization, and the family moved to the Philippines, France, and Singapore before he settled back in Scotland for university. He studied at the University of Edinburgh and trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow.
"I grew up speaking Scots when I was small, French when I was a teenager, and English the rest of the time. I came back to Scotland for Braveheart and the accent had to come out of the basement." — Angus Macfadyen, The Scotsman (2014, archived)
How Bruce came to him
Casting director Patsy Pollock has said in interviews that the Bruce role was the most-cast character in the film — the production saw close to eighty actors before Macfadyen. His audition was reportedly two scenes: the Edinburgh corridor pledge to Wallace ("if you would just lead them to freedom, they'd follow you. And so would I") and the "You lied!" confrontation with the leper father. Gibson cast him after the second.
"I read the corridor scene and I read the 'you lied' scene. Mel said: you have it. I asked him whether he wanted to see anything else. He said no, those are the two." — Angus Macfadyen, The Scotsman (2014, archived)
What the performance does
Macfadyen plays Bruce as a man arguing with himself out loud through the entire film. The corridor pledge is delivered with the half-smile of a man who knows he is contradicting his father. The Falkirk visor-lift is held in a single shot — Wallace looking up, Bruce looking down — and Macfadyen plays it without dialogue; the recognition is in the breath. The "You lied!" scene with Ian Bannen's leper father is the film's most operatic father-son moment, and Macfadyen turns from rage to grief inside three lines.
"Macfadyen has the hardest job in the film. The Bruce changes his mind four times in three hours and the audience has to follow him every time. He plays each shift in a single beat and never overplays the cost." — Mark Cousins, Sight & Sound (1995, archived from print)
The Bannockburn line at the Wind-Down — "You have bled with Wallace! Now bleed with me!" — is what the Bruce arc has been climbing toward for nearly three hours, and Macfadyen plays it as a man whose conversion is so total that the line comes out as a question made into a vow.
After Braveheart
Macfadyen did not become a leading man on the back of Braveheart. He played supporting roles in Titus (1999) for Julie Taymor, Cradle Will Rock (1999) for Tim Robbins, Saw III (2006) and Saw IV (2007), and We Bought a Zoo (2011). In 2019 he co-wrote and starred in Robert the Bruce, an unofficial Braveheart sequel directed by Richard Gray, which picked up the Bruce arc in the years between Wallace's death and Bannockburn — the film made for the territory Gibson's voice-over had compressed into a single line.
"I wrote Robert the Bruce because the Braveheart ending leaves you wanting the middle of the Bruce story. The voice-over says nine years; the Braveheart film cannot show those nine years. Someone had to fill them in." — Angus Macfadyen, The Scotsman (2019, archived)