| SCOTT NEAL IS A BIT OF A LAD, YOU KNOW. HE LIKES A night out. A laugh with his mates. A drink or two.
Take this morning. It's 11am and he's just rolled in for the Attitude photo-shoot (only slightly late, mind) with his mate Chris and is talking about this mad time they had in this bar in Soho last night. They were both really drunk, see, and this woman came up to them and started trying to chat them up and then...
Anyway, like I said, he's a bit of a lad.
Nothing like Ste Pearce in fact, the character he played in the groundbreaking boys-in-love flick Beautiful Thing. Whereas speccy Jamie more or less knew where he was going through the movie, Ste's confusion of vulnerability, aggression and - let's face it - downright horniness played cupid to hearts all over the country.
"A lot of guys tried it on with me after the film," he admits with a grin. "They chat you up or flirt with you, but I just have a laugh with it. Then there's the people who come up to me and tell me they love me, tell me I changed their lives. It's nice but it's kinda daunting as well. It's kind of like you're their property. If it's done so much to them, you became a big part of their lives and they think they know a lot about you and they don't. They know a helluva lot about Ste Pearce and not a lot about Scott Neal."
Beautiful Thing changed Scott's life. Barely 17 at the time, he embarked on a whirlwind tour of instant fame and endless promotion that ended with him crashing in Australia on holiday "to clear his head." Back in the UK, the party continued. He spent his money. He went to celeb launches. He bleached his hair ("me mum went mad"). He did what any teenager would do in his position.
Now 19, and still very much a geezer with a babyface, Scott seems older, wiser and very much in control of his career. He completed his second lead in a UK feature earlier this year. Shooting for two months in India, Wonderland is ostensibly the story of a boy searching for his father, but sounds like a weird mix of The Wizard of Oz and Trainspotting. "Somebody spikes his drink and then wakes up on a beach and the whole rest of the film is this dream sequence," he explains enthusiastically. "He's on this trip where all the people in the bar become fantasy characters that help him along his journey."
But the role that's going to put Scott's face in every household in the country is as Luke Ashton in long-running housewives' fave The Bill. Scott plays a wet-behind-the-ears probationer eager to make his mark as a PC. "He's very enthusiastic about this new job, but sometimes he makes a few little mistakes. It's a great role for me. Plus I get to wear a police uniform."
What more could a boy ask for?
|
