PETER Mullan tells me he has three different false beards for the film Tommy’s Honour. He has given names to all of them. Right now, he says, he is wearing Demis Roussos. “I’ve also got the mutton chops which is called Rock God. And I’ve got the big grey one that is Kenny Rogers.
“Important tip for actors. Get to know your beard. Treat your beard well and it will treat you well.”

Summer 2015 in a sun-dappled fold of East Lothian. Mullan is sitting basking in the sun decked out in Victorian finery, Demis Roussos and a very 21st-century pair of sunglasses offsetting the period look.
Sitting beside him, fellow actor Jack Lowden – equally attired in cutting-edge 19th-century fittings – has foresworn the bearded look for a natty little moustache. It is not his own.

“Everyone thinks his moustache is real,” Mullan points out. “It’s not but it looks beautiful because he treats his moustache well. With tenderness.”
“It takes a lot to pull off a moustache. It really does,” Lowden says, sounding unconvinced he’s quite managing it.

“I like it. I think it looks good,” Mullan says approvingly, taking in the current state of Lowden’s top lip.

Lowden remains to be persuaded. “If you wore it with trackies it would look odd.”

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Jack Lowden in Tommy's Honour

It’s the last but one day of filming on the set of Tommy’s Honour. We are on location and there’s an air of demob happiness in the air. This afternoon there’s a Christmas dinner scene to be filmed (very out of season). The food is all piled up in an anteroom and between takes bewhiskered Victorian gentlemen (or the actors portraying said gentlemen) are passing the time playing table tennis.

Somewhere out of sight the film’s director Jason Connery – yes, son of Sean – is setting up the next shot. Here the mood is calm. There’s no sense of desperation, no notion of squeezing out the last dregs of the shooting schedule. Instead, Mullan and Lowden are happy to chat away about facial hair and the class-ridden nature of the game of golf.

Sorry, yes, forgot to mention that, didn’t I? Tommy’s Honour is a sports film. It is based on the true story of Tom Morris (played by Mullan) and his son Tommy (that will be Lowden) who would become the world’s first professional golfer. Old Tom Morris was the greenkeeper at St Andrews as well as the winner of four of the first eight Open Championships.

Tommy won his first Open in 1868 at the age of 17, making him the youngest major champion in golf history. Morris Jr did much to promote golf as a spectator sport, putting noses out of joint in the process, partly by demanding to be paid.

“He’s literally the first professional athlete of all time,” the film’s American producer Keith Bank points out. “He was the first guy who said: ‘I know what I’m worth.’ He set the table for all the multi-million-dollar athletes of today.”

Morris was also dead by the age of 24, just months after the death of his wife after a difficult labour. The surprise might be that it’s taken so long to turn this into movie material. “I’m a passionate golfer,” says Bank, “and I’ve talked to people who have been around golf all their life and they don’t know the story. They don’t even know who Tom Morris was. I can’t believe this story hasn’t been told.”

“I’d never heard of the Morrises,” admits Mullan. “I don’t know s*** about golf.” But it’s clear he approves of Tommy Morris’s fight to play on his own terms. “Young Tommy basically took on the establishment. I don’t know if it’s turned me for or against golf because it still seems a pretty class-ridden sport, which is tragic because the sport was originated by peasants. It was obviously taken by the landed gentry because they could afford to build the golf courses. They owned the land.
“We invented a game in which we have to kiss ass.”

Mullan is not, as you may have already guessed, a golfer himself. But he and Lowden have had lessons. And they can hit a ball roughly in the right direction.

“It’s one of those things where if it works once you go: ‘Wooh! Great.’ If it worked all the time I might keep going,” Lowden says. “I’m going to at least keep going to driving ranges because there is something quite satisfying when you’re on your own to smack a golf ball.”

When we meet Lowden is still a new name. Since Tommy’s Honour he has played Morrissey in the film England is Mine, which was the closing film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. He also has a role in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming wartime epic Dunkirk.

Right now, though, he’s happy to play the back-up role to Mullan in conversation. After a few weeks together it’s clear that they are happy in each other’s company. But then that’s been the nature of the shoot, they both say. The weather has been kind and everyone has been getting on.
“It’s been a lovely shoot,” says Mullan, “and a lot of that comes from Jason. If you’ve got an asshole director it works its way down. People get narky. If you’ve got a really nice, chilled director like Jason it all falls into place. There’s no reason for grief.

“Acting, to paraphrase Bill Shankly on football, is a very simple game complicated by idiots. It’s a simple task. Someone says turn over, you pretend to be someone else for three minutes. It is that simple. Robert Mitchum had the best definition of acting I’ve ever heard. On a horse. Off a horse. And it’s so true. It’s with a beard or without. It’s as simple and as complex as that.”

A little earlier, over lunch, Ophelia Lovibond, who is playing Tommy’s wife Meg, offers an alternative summary of the art of acting: learning not to breathe.

She is holding up the dress she will have to get into for her next scene. “This is a 21-inch waist, I think,” she says. Is that a size zero then, I ask. “I think it’s double zero. It’s really small. In this dress you have to do shallow breaths and avoid sneezing.”

Lovibond, who you might recognise from the TV series Hooten & the Lady, is also not a golfer. She’s been told her swing defies physics. “It’s so jelly like,” she laughs.

Her character is untypical of the time, she says, a strong woman who had a child out of wedlock, a fact that was written into the parish book. “She was named and shamed literally.” Researching her character’s past, Lovibond learned that women in Whitburn had to carry soil on their backs equal to the weight of another person. “And they did that day in, day out, year after year. And they got pennies for it.”

Has she tried that herself? “I didn’t go method on that bit. I used my imagination.”

She had one of her big emotional scenes yesterday, she says. “Jason got a bit teary.”

This afternoon the director has dry eyes but is in a state of mild worry that he doesn't have time to get everything done. “I heard a director describe making a film as a burning house and trying to get as much out as you can before it burns down, which is a good analogy.”

In his Portakabin Connery is thinking about his relationship with Scotland, with his famous father and with the game of golf. Tommy’s Honour, he points out, tells a story that has many parallels for its directors.

“I was brought up in Scotland. I was at Gordonstoun and then I started at Perth Rep. My father is a huge player of golf and I grew up with him playing with him, doing pro-celebrity with Peter Alliss in the 1980s and 90s. My dad obviously lives in the Bahamas now and he lives on a golf course.

“I wouldn’t have seen my dad if I didn’t play. He was either working or playing golf. And I loved the game.”

Well, mostly. “The way I look at it if my golf’s good then my career’s in the toilet. If the golf’s bad my career is good. So at the moment my golf is bad.”

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Lowden, Mullan and Jason Connery at the Edinburgh International Film Festival last year

He is enjoying being the man at the centre of things on the film, calling the shots. Is Jason Connery the director a different man than Jason Connery the actor? “Yeah. It’s so different being behind the camera.

Jason Connery the actor …” he pauses, put off by his own description of himself in the third person. “I always felt it was hard for me to say: ‘I’m great. Hire me. I can play the part.’ I felt that I could but I felt it hard to say.

“But if you give me a story I will do absolutely everything to tell that story. I found film very disjointed from an actor’s point of view, but from a director’s point of view I can hold the story.”

Tommy’s Honour has allowed him to spend more time in Scotland. He feels very at home here. “I’ve had a cottage in the Borders for 20 years and I come over the hill and I just feel this adrenalin and a sense of calm comes over me. I take my son there.

“I live in LA because of him, but he’s got a British passport. I intend to come back much more and I just have this sense of affinity with the place.”

And filming Tommy’s Honour it’s been kind to him. Even when the weather’s been particularly Scottish.

“We have a scene in North Berwick and on that day it was blowing 35, nearly 40 miles an hour. The gorse was like this …” He waves his hands wildly and makes a huge, dramatic noise. “Wwwwwhhooosh … And just that wind adds this huge element.”

He has to get back to work but before he goes he looks out at the sunshine. “It can be pissing, it can be like this. We got a lot of the clouds and the sun bursting through.

“It’s not Brigadoon and I like that.”

Tommy’s Honour (PG) is in cinemas now