For Joe, the enigmatic bargeman played by Ewan McGregor in Young Adam, employment is a necessary evil, a burden on the back of his freedom. But any sweat on his brow has little to do with coal shovelling. Alienated from his fellow men but intimately acquainted with their women, he mocks the work ethic, fleeing responsibility from bed to back alley.

In a film where sex and death are seldom far from the surface, only one character truly matches Joe’s detached yet insatiable appetite. In the dark of a side street, he and Gwen perform one of the most clinical couplings ever committed to celluloid. Soaked in gin, recently widowed and about to steal her sister’s lover, Gwen’s discarded cigarette is the solitary warmth in what follows.

Unlike Gwen, Therese Bradley is a respectable working girl. Pale and freckled, at 35 she seems slighter and younger than her twenty-something character, sweeping hair back from blue-green eyes when she elaborates a point. Despite appearing in less than a third of the film, the memory of Bradley’s performance lingers so strongly you might imagine you can still see her smoke rings wafting over the credits. Gwen is a woman who’s done things, been damaged by life and is keen to take it down with her, a sexually suggestive tilt of red curls accompanying her every playful utterance. Amidst excellent performances from the entire cast, Variety singled her out as “terrific”.

Yet when the Barrhead-born actress attends Young Adam’s UK premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival, she will find herself in the rare position of not having to check her fellow patrons’ tickets. She may have been lauded at the Cannes Festival, but this jobbing actress still ushers in a London art house cinema, a situation she claims to be completely content with.

“Work as an actress comes and goes. If you get through the door and you’re seen for something then you’re in the raffle. When I read David Mackenzie’s script for Young Adam it was just so bang on, it was so there. Ever since then, I’ve been very excited about things, but I’m keeping my feet firmly on the ground. All my friends are struggling actors or artists, all very real people. And I think it’s important to maintain these relationships because ultimately, that’s where your material comes from.”

Adapted by Last Great Wilderness director Mackenzie from a novel by the Scottish Beat writer Alexander Trocchi, Young Adam is set on the canals between Glasgow and Edinburgh in the 1950s. Highly regarded by fellow Beats like William Burroughs but shunned by the Scottish literary establishment, Trocchi was a heroin addict who penned pornography and even pimped his wife to finance his addiction, living in notoriety until his death in 1984 of lobal pneumonia. The film represents a bold and largely successful attempt to transfer his vague, narcissistic and highly sexual first-person narrator to the screen, relating the discovery by Joe and workmate Leslie (Peter Mullan) of the corpse of a young woman (Emily Mortimer) in the canal, and Joe’s subsequent seduction of Leslie’s wife, Ella (Tilda Swinton).

It received a standing ovation at Cannes, which Bradley was lucky to see.

“I bought a cheap flight, put on my best frock, then this French bouncer wouldn’t let me pick up my tickets! It got sorted out eventually, but for a while there I thought a prophecy was coming true, like somehow I wasn’t supposed to be there! And it was so strange because one minute this bouncer wouldn’t even let me into the hotel, the next I’m at a party with Ewan!

“Emily and Ewan really looked after me there. She’s a lovely human being, Emily, a wee diamond. Tilda’s lovely too, she’s very warm. When we first met we were just doing girly things like putting on lipstick, having Polaroids taken, just trying to see if there were any sister-like similarities between us. I met my boyfriend while we were filming and she wanted to know everything about him. She’s surprisingly girly Tilda.

“And Ewan, well, it’s really interesting because you read a lot about Ewan being a geezer, but my experience of him, particularly on the day we filmed that scene in the alley, was of an incredibly kind gentleman. He really took care of me.

“It was my first movie, I didn’t quite know the etiquette of what I could and couldn’t say, but he made sure the set was closed and that I was comfortable. I felt completely able to just go ahead and do it.”

Though it was passed uncut by the censor, much early publicity surrounding the film has focused on the sex scenes, with one particular sequence between McGregor and Mortimer involving a bowl of custard drawing comparisons with Last Tango in Paris.

“It doesn’t bother me to be honest,” she says, “the tabloids are going to print what they want, but I’ve got absolute faith in those who see it realising there’s more there than titillation. As an actor you have to be able to identify with the dark parts of yourself, and I would say that reading the book I became aware of my sex scene as totally functional. Gwen wasn’t engaged in an erotic sense whatsoever – she just wanted to piss off the sister she thinks is so self-righteous. So at the time I didn’t feel anxious at all, but a few hours afterwards I did feel a tremendous sadness, just for her as a human being. I found moments in her of vulnerability, but it’s the vulnerability that makes her snap back into being a hard woman. Emotions threaten her survival, so she’s become like an animal. She’s a bit of a cat.

“When I met my boyfriend I was coming back to London during filming, and that was great because living with Gwen in your soul is hard work. But I have to say, the night I met him I had been single for a long time, and for me to just spot someone in a bar and go over and say hello makes my heart race. So I borrowed a tiny bit of Gwen just to give me the bottle to go over. Not too much though. Otherwise I’d never have seen him again!”

Young Adam is Bradley’s highest profile role to date, after brief television appearances in Glasgow Kiss and The Book Group and various pieces of theatre work. She seems happy with life at the moment, but this wasn’t always the case. She was 19 and in a relationship when she moved down to London, but she didn’t know anyone and her partner “turned out to be a psycho – really violent.”

“Luckily, there were two women at the office I was working in who helped me do a midnight flit.”

She was made homeless, but by chance was taken in by Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols.

“He came into the pub where I worked after hearing from friends I needed a room, and just said: “Come live with me, I’ve got a big pad.” So he took me in for about a year and was really kind to me. There was no ulterior motive. He was much older and was like a big brother.

“The nineties in London were so exciting. I was a singer in a dance band that toured Japan and before that I was a singer in a rock group called Smell Funky Beast , but I got tired of men, testosterone and big, loud guitars. I had been hanging out in Camden, going into pubs with the Pogues, which was fun – I got to know Shane McGowan around the time of their Peace and Love album.

“At the start of a night he’d be quite coherent, he’s a good man with a fine soul, but by the end he’d no longer be with us. Even when he got to that state, he was still capable of writing like God spoke through him. I remember my Mum came to London and he was lovely to her, having their photo taken together. I had partied it up big style by this time, but I got to the point where I had bashed away at music for too long and wanted to try acting.”

Enrolling in an acting degree at Middlesex University, she emerged with first class honours and a deep desire to write as well as tread the boards.

“Though I’ve lived in London for ten years, any characters I write are Scots. I just think there’s an incredible richness to them as characters – we’re a very dramatic race, very passionate and emotional. I’d love to be directed by Gilles MacKinnon, Lynne Ramsay or Peter Mullan. He’s a good laugh Peter, and great fun to have on set. I’d like to write a story like Orphans about my family or big families in general and what they do to each other. There are a lot of beautiful stories in family sadness.

“For this film though, the way I’ve explained it to my mother is: Mum, there’s a sex scene. She’s an old-fashioned Catholic woman, so I was really proud she managed to put that aside and say, whatever you do, I’m going to be proud of you. And maybe I’ll just have to close my eyes at that point.

“But she’s had eight weans, so I don’t think she’s going to be too surprised by it to be honest”

A version of this article originally appeared in The Sunday Times in Scotland, August 2003

Review: Young Adam A complex tale simply told, Young Adam looks set to become British Cinema’s major critical triumph for 2003. Early buzz, generated from the film bouncing around the odd film festival or two, has suggested that this engaging psychological drama...