Onward thespian soldier: Swapping bullets for Broadway

Ewan Ross swapped bullets for Broadway when he left the Army to become an actor. Now he's starring in a film about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.

(SUSANNAH IRELAND / THE INDEPENDENT)

Ewan Ross was dodging bombs and bullets in Basra when he decided to hand in his weapons for the last time and become an actor. It was quite a life change for a former British army officer whose only experience of treading the boards had been a disastrous stint as a Roman soldier in a nativity play, aged five, when he missed his cue to go on stage because he was too busy throwing stones at a teacher's window. The episode proved telling and he grew up to be a soldier rather than an actor.

But decades later – after a military and security career spanning 10 years – he made a dramatic volte-face and gave everything up to follow the life of a thespian. It was to be the beginning of a journey of funding his way through stage school by carrying a gun as a private security consultant, of studying Shakespearean sonnets while preparing for an ambush on a roof in Basra, racing home from Iraq to get back in time to dance the lead in Oklahoma! and reading scripts to the sound of gunfire in Lagos. As an officer in the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, Captain Ross had – as the regimental motto "Utrinque Paratus" states – been "ready for anything", but ballet classes were perhaps not what he had initially had in mind.

And now, as an actor, his life appears to have described a surreal full circle. Seven weeks ago, he picked up a pistol again, fired a bullet into a man's head and killed him. Of course, this time the bullet was a blank and the fatal shot was fired as part of his most challenging role to date, as one of the police officers who killed the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in a film, Brazuca, produced by the Bafta-winning director Stephen Frears.

In the movie, due out next year, Ross, 37, found that his experience in handling weapons came in particularly useful. Far from it being a disadvantage, he is adamant that his time in the Army has prepared him for the stresses and strains of acting. "Some people would say I was acting all the way through my army career," he jokes.

A grammar-school boy from an academic family, the son of the deputy director of education for Grampian, Ross shunned university in favour of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, commissioning as an officer in the Royal Highland Fusiliers. Three years later, at the age of 23, he opted to transfer over to the Parachute Regiment. He recalls only too well enduring the infamously tough P Coy (Pegasus Company) selection process, and the pain of losing six toenails.

But after seven years in the Army, including tours in Northern Ireland, he decided to leave in 1998. "It was like finishing with a girlfriend you are in love with but know there is no future with," he explains. Seeking work on civvy street, he travelled and contemplated life in the City. But like many who had left before him, he ended up using the skills he had learned as a private security consultant. After a year negotiating the perilous and volatile world of security in Ecuador and Colombia, living in "hollow, soulless" luxury, he decided to try out acting and headed to see his sister in Montreal, where he attended his first class.

"It is the only time in my life that I have been transfixed for three hours. The teacher pulled me aside and said I should go to the Playhouse in New York. Once the decision was made, everything else didn't matter," he said.

For the next year, he lived an eccentric life, alternating months between acting in Canada, and security work around Pakistan as well as the treacherous oil-field area of Nigeria.

"I can remember reading a script, smoking a cigarette with gunfire in the background in Lagos. I was going to A-list parties in Montreal one weekend and the next week I was telling a Nigerian oil baron how to keep pirates off his rig. It was bizarre," he says. "It only felt shallow when [back in Africa] beggars were banging on your car. But when I went back, I left it behind. There was an element of switching it on and off. The acting classes were almost therapeutic: the emotion of anger was easy to tap into, probably due to the stresses and fear of putting oneself in danger."

The following year, he gained a place at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York, which boasts Gregory Peck, Robert Duvall and Steve McQueen among its former pupils. Short on money, he returned one more time to the battlefield as a private security consultant, this time in Iraq.

"I was cut off from the rest of the guys in a house full of locals with just one Walter Mitty French Algerian, who had lied about being in the [French Foreign] Legion. Luckily, I had the armoury in my bedroom, so I took Walter and as much ammo as I could up to the rooftop along with the satellite phone.

"There I was sitting on this rooftop in Basra, surrounded by weapons and ammo, reading Shakespearean sonnets for my speech class, to kill time amid the chaos," he explains. Weeks later, he arrived in New York in time to rehearse the lead in Oklahoma!.

Since graduating, he has played Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet at New York's Soho Rep and the poet Frank O'Hara in The Last Bohemians at the Medicine Show Theater, and Deborah Harry's lover in the film Honey Trap. Most recently, he played a bent policeman in the low-budget indie film Kung Fu Flid.

In the Mango Films' production about Jean Charles de Menezes, Ross plays the first of two policemen who shot the 27-year-old when he was mistaken for a suicide bomber at Stockwell Tube station after the 2005 bombings. In preparation for the part, Ross was at pains to put the subsequent revelation that Menezes was innocent to the back of his mind and focus on how the officer was feeling at the time.

"We weren't trying to make the cops on the ground out to be monsters. They had no idea he was innocent. You cannot play the part thinking, 'I am about to kill an innocent man.' You would not be doing it justice. Obviously, one has to approach a controversial, true-to-life role like this with a certain amount of respect. But if you know the background and training of those you are portraying, it gives you an edge," he explains. "As an actor, it was great, but afterwards there was an element of remorse, of almost having an element of involvement. I was asked by the director if I wanted to meet his family, but I declined, as it just didn't seem right."

He believes that his past life as a soldier can only help in certain roles. Future projects he has planned for next year is a part in a film about the famous SAS and 1 Parachute Regiment rescue of British soldiers held hostage by the ruthless rebel gang of the West Side Boys in Sierra Leone in 2000. He has no regrets that this time he will be role-playing. "If joining the Army was the best thing I ever did, the second-best thing I did was leaving," he says.