FINLAY MacMillan doesn’t really like seeing himself on the screen. “I don’t like playbacks at all,” he says as we sit together on a hot August afternoon in Glasgow. “If I do an audition tape at home and it feels right I’ll just send it. I never watch myself.

“I just think if I watch myself I’m looking for different things than an audience member. An audience member is just looking at this character and I’m like: “Oh, is that a bogey coming out of my nose?’”

He probably shouldn’t worry given that his next film is the blockbuster new Tim Burton movie Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Presumably Hollywood can use CGI to get rid of any excess nasal blockages.

And unlike Fin (as his friends know him), the rest of us might have to get used to viewing the young Govan actor on the screen. Miss Peregrine marks his big-screen debut and he’s hoping it’s the first of many. You might already know him from roles in Waterloo Road and River City. But now Fin is travelling a bit further than Shieldinch. He’s a regular visitor to London and Los Angeles.

Fin plays one of the titular “peculiar children” in the Tim Burton movie. Shooting it he got to hang out with his co-stars Samuel L Jackson, Eva Green and even Dame Judi Dench. But that wasn’t the only thing that was different about shooting a big-budget movie.

“Going from River City to Waterloo Road was manageable. When I was first on the set of Miss P I didn’t know what to do.”

When did it sink in that he was part of this big-budget movie? “When I got my trailer. I got a minute to go in and get a glass of water and sit down and just chill. That’s when I realised. I poked my head out the door and it was still there. ‘Oh my God, this is a real thing.’”

Surprisingly, he says, there were less special effects involved in the movie than you might think. “There was hardly any. There’s one guy who’s meant to be invisible so he was dressed in this stuff. He had this sort of balaclava on. You could only really see his eyes and he was just covered in blue. He had this wee tartan suit thing and a wee hat and it was just hilarious. ‘Is that a blueberry running about?’”

Human blueberries apart, the big difference between TV and big-budget cinema is scale and speed, he says.

“On TV we shot really quickly. I think it was over 20 pages of dialogue a day on River City. Going to the film it was half a page sometimes. If we were lucky, three pages. And then often on the next day we would go back to the scene we thought we had finished.

“It was a slow process, but I quite liked that because  I got a lot of time to think about what I was going to do.”

In truth Fin has known what he wanted to do from a young age. When he was five he went to an acting club at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama [now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland] and took part in a performance of Aladdin. “I just remember kneeling down and worshipping some guy who was the main guy and loving it.”

He also loved music and was in a band as a teenager but when he got the job on River City his future career was fixed.

He’s been lucky, he admits. But it’s hard to break through from Glasgow. If his career really takes off he’d like to help others to follow in his footsteps.
“If I get wealthy I’d like to fund some charities and maybe in Glasgow I feel that there’s not enough for young kids who want to be actors. There’s clubs and stuff, but there’s not a lot of agents. There’s not a lot of people reaching out to people who want to be actors.”

Even if things do take off for him he can’t imagine ever leaving his home city. London and Los Angeles are cities in which to work rather than live. “I feel in London it’s all business and LA is like that but on steroids. And the gap from rich to poor in LA is just staggering.”

When is Weegieness most obvious? “When I’m drunk, I think.”

Is that a common occurrence then? “No. I don’t really drink. I’d like to have the time but I don’t. It’s really nice to go down to Sloan’s in Glasgow and see people I know. My mum’s got friends in Glasgow I knew growing up. One of them is a fortune teller. She’s a good friend. I try to bum a pint off her if I can.

Has she ever told him his fortune? “Not yet. I’ve asked her not to because if she doesn’t say I’m going to be a really good actor then I’m not going to come and see her anymore.”

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is in from next Friday.