Glasgow is bright when Séamus McLean Ross joins the call. It is one of those clear, generous days that alter the rhythm of everything around them. He is taking it slowly. There are plans to go for a swim later with his sister, maybe at Loch Lomond, and for now, he sounds exactly where he is: relaxed, unhurried, content to let the day unfold. ”Chilling,” he says. “Just chilling, man, not doing much.”
It is a calm note to begin on, though the moment he is in professionally is anything but still. Ross is in the middle of a significant stretch of work, with projects that have quickly expanded both his range and his visibility. He will next be seen starring as Gavin Bain in California Schemin’, his feature film debut and James McAvoy’s directorial debut. Based on the true story of Silibil N’ Brains, the film follows two young men from Dundee who convinced the music industry they were an established Californian rap duo, securing a record deal and appearing on MTV before the fiction began to unravel. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2024 and is set for a UK theatrical release in April.
Ross has also been named one of Screen Daily’s Scottish Stars of Tomorrow. Currently, he appears as Colum MacKenzie in Outlander: Blood of My Blood, the Starz/Sony prequel to the Outlander franchise, for which he has already completed filming on a second season. His other screen credits include ITV’s Payback and the BBC’s Rebus, while his professional stage debut in The Flea at The Yard Theatre drew strong reviews.
Still, he speaks about all of it with a degree of disbelief. “It felt surreal,” he says of the past year. “It just felt like a dream come true to work on big projects and work, making movies and making TV shows. That’s always been my dream.” The emphasis, when he talks about his career, is less on recognition than on the fact of working. That is the thing he returns to most naturally: the privilege and strangeness of getting to do the job at all. “I think every actor just wants to work,” he says. “When you leave drama school, you have no idea what the world’s gonna look like. And I’ve been very lucky so far with the jobs I’ve had.”
There is a disorientation to success when it arrives in motion, before you have fully adjusted to the previous step. Ross describes it as something close to weather, a storm you are inside before you can measure its scale. “When you’re in the middle of a storm, sometimes it’s like you’re not really aware of what’s happening,” he says.
That sense of movement sits at the centre of California Schemin’, a film that, even in summary, sounds improbable enough to be invented. Two men from Dundee decide to present themselves as a Californian rap act and are believed, not briefly, but long enough to pass through a music industry built on image and confidence. It is a story about performance before it is a story about fraud: about the identities people build, and the willingness of others to accept them.
For Ross, the appeal was immediate. “Working with James McAvoy, definitely,” he says, when asked what drew him to the project. “The script was so exciting, and it’s a fresh Scottish story that I don’t think we’ve seen before.”
He is also alert to what the film represents within a national context. Scotland has produced no shortage of strong cinema, but Ross speaks about California Schemin’ in terms of tone as much as subject. “A kind of light-hearted, fun, joyful movie is something that I think the Scottish industry is calling out for,” he says. “To be part of something like that was really exciting.”
There is something useful in that distinction. The film carries the scale of a true-life rise-and-fall story, but also the looseness and energy of something made to be enjoyed. It gives Ross a role with dramatic movement and comic rhythm, and it places him at the centre of a story rooted in a specific Scottish sensibility without being limited by it.
It also meant working with McAvoy at a formative moment in his own career, as he stepped behind the camera for the first time.
Ross, when he speaks about him comes through clearly as admiration for the level at which McAvoy operates. “He’s so talented at what he does, and he brings such vigour and passion to everything he does,” he says. “Getting the chance to work with him was just a dream come true.”
What he took from the experience, he says, was partly technical and partly less tangible. “I learned loads of things, probably more subconscious things, but loads of things in terms of screen acting and detail, and just the energy and focus it requires to work at a really high level.” Watching someone further down the line in their career, he suggests, offers its own form of education. “Seeing someone at that stage is really inspiring,” he says. “I just kind of hope I’ll get there.”
If California Schemin’ marked his feature debut, it also introduced a new set of demands. Gavin Bain is not an imagined figure but a living one, and Ross approached the role with an attentiveness that was both practical and immersive.
“I met him loads,” he says. “Playing someone alive and a real person is something I’ve never done before, and it was quite daunting. “The preparation became a matter of proximity. “I just tried to soak as much of him into me as I could,” he says. He read Bain’s diary entries, listened repeatedly to the music, watched the documentary, and worked with an acting coach to chart the character’s progression through the story. What interested him was not only who Gavin Bain is, but how he changes, where Gavin ends and “Brains” begins, and how that transition might register physically.
That attention to movement within a character tells you a lot about how Ross works. He is interested in the mechanics of transformation: the shift in posture, energy, confidence, and the line between private identity and performed self. In a film like California Schemin’, where one persona is consciously built over another, that becomes central.
The role also required him to navigate a difficult tonal balance. The film blends humour, deception, ambition and collapse, and Ross is clear that comedy, especially on screen, cannot be approached casually.
“I think I’m quite sincere in everything I do,” he says, “but maybe that kind of worked for the humour of Gavin, because I don’t think he’s aware sometimes of the humour around him.”
It is a sharp observation that aligns with the best principles of screen comedy. “You’re not playing funny, you’re playing earnestly,” he says. “And the comedy happens around the situation.”
Comedy is not a lighter work. It is more exacting. “It’s much more precise,” he says. “You have to make these lines land and zing.” That precision, timing, rhythm, restraint, becomes another test, and one Ross seems to have welcomed.
Alongside the film, Ross has also stepped into an established television universe with Outlander: Blood of My Blood, playing a younger Colum MacKenzie. It is a different kind of challenge: not the invention of a character from scratch, but entry into a world that already exists in the minds of its audience.
“It’s been amazing,” he says of the experience. “The fans have just been so welcoming.” The scale of the production has left its own impression. “The sets are so insane, and it’s kind of everything you hope it will be,” he says. The pleasure, though, lies less in spectacle than in inheritance. “You’re stepping into a universe,” he says, “already filled with rich characters.”
Playing a younger version of an established figure could easily become an exercise in imitation, but Ross does not describe it that way. His instinct is to begin where he always begins: with the scripts, with what stands out, with how the character moves in relation to the world around him. “Just trusting your instincts with a character,” as he puts it.
That instinct, however, is not divorced from detail. Ross talks about learning seemingly dry information — finances, livestock, exchange values — because those details make the world credible from the inside. The value of research, for him, is important. “When you say these words, you know what the cost of that means,” he says. “You’re not just saying hollow sentences.”
He is similarly direct when asked about pressure. “Yeah, I do feel pressure,” he says. “But you have to say, ‘ go for it! ‘”
The answer lands because it is honest and unvarnished. Ross does not try to finesse anxiety into something more elegant. He names it and moves past it. The larger point is about trust: that actors can become their own barriers as easily as their own advocates, and that too much self-consciousness can distort the work before it begins. “As soon as you put yourself to the side and just trust yourself, things can happen,” he says.
His reflections on theatre, television and film carry that same lack of pretence. He does not overstate his certainty. In fact, one of the more appealing things about Ross in the interview is his willingness to admit where he still feels in the process. He has worked across stage and screen, but he is careful not to suggest he has already settled the question of how they differ.
“I’m still figuring it out,” he says.
What he does know is precise enough. Theatre gives you more time with text, more repetition, more space to play something over many nights. Screen acting requires a different discipline. “There is much more stillness,” he says. “You just have to think the thoughts.”
That phrase gets close to the core of what he is learning now. Not how to show emotion, but how to trust that emotion will register without insistence. “I think I’ve often tried to show that I’m acting,” he says. “Whereas on screen, the real trick is to trust that the audience will see what’s in your eyes.”
Recognition has arrived quickly. Being named one of Screen Daily’s Stars of Tomorrow would flatter most young actors into at least a little self-mythology. Ross appears determined to resist it. “You can’t let that stuff impact your career,” he says. He is not dismissive of the honour, only wary of what happens when outside language begins to interfere with internal focus. “When you start to believe that hype about yourself, that’s a sure recipe for failure,” he says. “You’re thinking about your ego, not the work.”
Instead, he talks about preserving something lighter and more instinctive: “your natural, childlike buzz about jobs.” It is a good phrase, and one that suggests he sees openness, appetite and enthusiasm as forms of discipline in their own right.
When the conversation turns to the source of his love of acting, he becomes more reflective. The answer is less tidy than some of the others, and more revealing for that. He talks about youth theatre, about realising he was good at it, about naturally continuing. But what remains most vivid is Ross’ sensation to the craft.”I felt alive doing it,” he says.
Acting, in his description, is partly escape and partly alignment. It offers him an imagined world, but not one that feels false. In fact, he suggests that set life can feel more coherent than ordinary life does. “I think I struggle living my normal life,” he says. “And when I’m on set, I really feel like I’m aligned.”
It is one of the revealing moments in the interview because it avoids clichés. He is talking about a feeling of rightness, of things clicking into place through the act of work. “For some reason,” he says, “I’m just kind of chasing that feeling.”
For now, what comes next remains open. There are projects on the horizon, but nothing is set in stone. He talks about it plainly, without any attempt to build suspense around what is not yet decided. He is, as he says, trying to do what every actor is trying to do: book the next job.
As for where he would like to go next, the answer is expansive in the best way. “Put me in space, put me in a cowboy hat,” he says. “I’m game.”
It is an apt note to end on. Space, western, period drama, contemporary film, the specifics matter less than the readiness. Ross is still early in his career, but he already has the beginnings of something defined: a seriousness about craft, an instinctive relationship to performance, and a refusal to let recognition outrun the work itself.
Photographer Una Burnand
Groomer Joe Mills
Fashion Keeley Dawson
Writer Kirsten Kate Santana
