WHEN Kevin McKidd took on his latest job, the actor faced the usual dilemma - should he really choose work that would keep him away from his family for so long?
But going for the role of Roman soldier Lucius Vorenus in the BBC's epic new drama series Rome made that decision even harder than usual, as it meant he would be filming in Italy for a long 14 months.
The 32-year-old has two young children with his wife Jane - Joseph, five, and three-year-old Iona. For the first half of the Rome shoot they stayed at home as, McKidd says, filming the drama was "too intense", but they joined him during the summer holidays.
"That's one of the things that attracted me to this role, actually," says the Scottish-born actor. "I know what it's like to be away and then have to come back and integrate yourself with the family and try to reconnect.
The first episode of Rome - a blockbuster new series that chronicles the rise of the Roman Empire through the eyes of McKidd's character Vorenus and his fellow soldier Titus Pullo, played by Ray Stevenson - sees Vorenus returning home to a wife and family who think he is dead.
"There was basically a clerical error," explains McKidd. "Somebody ticked the wrong box. Money was sent back to families but the soldiers were in Gaul and the lines of communication weren't perfect. So basically Veronus's wife Niobe fell on her sister and her sister's husband for support in the eight years he's been away."
It's just one storyline in an epic drama that follows the plottings of those in power as well as the lives of the common people. We see Julius Caesar (Ciaran Hinds) scheming to overthrow his old friend Pompey (Kenneth Cranham) with the help of Marc Anthony (James Purefoy).
The stories are told against the backdrop of the colourful, violent and sexually liberated world of ancient Rome. The series is not for the faint-hearted and features graphic scenes of violence as well as full-frontal nudity (both male and female) and uninhibited sex scenes.
This was a world where the rich and powerful would have sex in front of their slaves or soldiers and where life, if you weren't nobility, was cheap.
At the heart of the drama is the relationship between McKidd's Vorenus and Ray Stevenson's Pullo. The pair are thrown together on a mission for Caesar, two very different soldiers who, at first, struggle to get on. Vorenus is the straight-laced superior, Pullo the wildcard soldier not keen on taking orders.
"They're initially set up as this antithetical coupling," says McKidd. "It's oil and water. But that very much changes when they're thrown together throughout the series. They become pillars for each other, but even they as characters don't know why they're drawn to each other."
It's another period drama for McKidd in what is now a long list of period dramas. He also recently finished filming The Virgin Queen, the BBC's drama about Elizabeth I starring Anne Marie Duff, and has starred in Kingdom Of Heaven with Orlando Bloom, and BBC Two's Gunpowder, Treason & Plot. We'll next see him in another Roman epic The Last Legion, starring Ben Kingsley.
"What I like about period drama is that you can use it to comment on what's going on now, and about people's lives," he says. "I think audiences can connect with what you're saying more easily because it's in the past. If you say this is a drama that's happening right now I think it's harder and more uncomfortable sometimes.
"It's a late Roman epic in which I play a fundamentalist Visigoth who single-handedly destroys Rome," he explains. "He takes the final step to kill the Caesar bloodline. That was very weird for me because in Rome I'm a staunch Roman supporter.
He is currently back in more modern times, filming the fourth Hannibal Lecter film Behind The Mask, which tells the story of the teenage Hannibal, in eastern Europe.
Following that, he is due to return to his role as Private Cooper in the horror sequel Dog Soldiers: Fresh Meat. It is a roll of success that initially eluded him after his appearance in cult 1996 film Trainspotting. While Robert Carlyle and Ewan McGregor went on to huge success after the film proved a hit, McKidd had to take up work as a bicycle courier when more roles failed to appear.
He scraped things back, however, starring in a number of independent films and TV series such as Anna Karenina, and with Rome doing well in the States despite being up against TV behemoth Desperate Housewives, it finally looks like he is catching up with his fellow Trainspotting stars.
"It certainly feels like I'm moving up to a new level," he says. "It feels like an apprenticeship has been served and I'm actually moving ahead now.
"But I think it's good that it's been ten years now for me, because I feel as though I've got the tools to move up. I don't feel overawed by it."
NOT many people get to eat lunch in their work canteen watched over by an Oscar. But at Aardman Animations in Bristol there's a trophy cabinet brimming with Academy Awards and Baftas bestowed in honour of the colourful characters and quirky creatures the studio has created over the years.
Sadly, many were destroyed in a fire that tore through the warehouse in another part of Bristol where Aardman's work was archived. Models from the film Chicken Run, the Wallace & Gromit shorts and the Creature Comforts series, as well as the Lurpak butter man and the much-loved Morph, were all said to be destroyed in the fire.
"Even though it is a precious and nostalgic collection and valuable to the company," he says, "in light of other tragedies like the recent earthquake in Pakistan, what happened isn't a big deal."
It was Park's short film Creature Comforts which earned him his first Oscar in 1991, as well as a legion of fans who fell in love with his off-beat Plasticine creations inspired by voices provided by the general public. The idea was used in the Heat Electric adverts, so popular with viewers they would phone ITV to see when the adverts were scheduled to go on air.
More hilarious, heart-warming creatures will be joining the regular characters - including two bull terriers, dubbed the bling dogs by the production team, some hard-of-hearing bats and a mad hare.
"We wanted to keep the series moving on," says producer Julie Lockhart. "The first series was very observational and underplayed in some respects. There are a lot more gags this time, we pushed the boundaries a bit more and found people a little bit more gregarious."
Work recording the voices began last summer, when interviewers were sent out across Britain to find a cross section of accents and ages from the general public.
A team of eight pulled out all the stops to produce more than 200 characters for the series. With each individual puppet averaging a week-and-a-half to make, it was no mean feat.
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