IT’S one of the most violent scenes in recent movie memory, and yet it contains not a single gun, knife or drop of blood. Instead it’s a suburban dinner-table exchange from the family melodrama The Secret Lives of Dentists, with Campbell Scott’s brittle and emotionally repressed husband sniping at his errant wife, Hope Davis. Here, after one particularly excruciating silence, the dangerously taut Scott finally snaps and hisses under his breath: “I could kill you!” It’s a terrifying line, made all the more disturbing by the simmering intensity of Scott, an increasingly commanding and versatile actor who seems incapable of delivering a bad performance.

“I hate to tell you this,” interjects the 44-year-old actor, son of the Hollywood legend George C. Scott and the theatrical heavyweight Colleen Dewhurst, “but there’s an entire subset of people out there who think of me as quite a dull actor. And that’s the word used, and often — dull.”

Scott is the world’s worst self-publicist. With The Secret Lives of Dentists, plus a slew of critically lauded performances on the way, including the Sundance favourite The Dying Gaul and the commercial thriller The Exorcism of Emily Rose, the hardworking New York actor is finally entitled to some professional preening.

Yet Scott, who made a stunning movie debut as a narcissistic fitness instructor in the 1990s Aids drama Longtime Companion, consistently flags up “the movies that I sucked in” (mostly TV flicks, and the Julia Roberts vehicle Dying Young), jokingly refers to his artier turns as “boring” and insists that he’s on the verge of packing it all in.

“I don’t think that Campbell sees acting as a very exalted profession,” says the director of Dentists, Alan Rudolph (who also cast a superlative Scott as the boozy, fastidious and quick-witted Robert Benchley in Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle from 1994). “In fact I think Campbell might even be slightly embarrassed by being an actor, despite the fact that he’s probably as effective and as talented and as accomplished an actor as America has to offer.”

Rudolph also suggests that the influence of Scott’s parents, ostensibly two hard-working thespians with heavy theatre backgrounds, helped to create an actor who is not only gifted but one who “has the most healthy attitude that an actor can have — he’s not interested in celebrity”.

And certainly, Scott’s indifference to conventional movie stardom has shaped an independent career path and a compelling screen persona that nonetheless displays a remarkable consistency from role to role. From the fitness instructor in Longtime Companion, to Benchley in Mrs Parker to the genius inventor in The Spanish Prisoner or the fast-talking serial seducer in Roger Dodger, the Campbell Scott screen performance is often defined by a certain patrician elegance, a cool stately bearing combined with flashes of verbal dexterity, a great sense of control and, ultimately, confidence.

“But that confidence doesn’t come from me, man!” he winces. “That’s just my manner when I talk to people. And that, that’s all fake! Hahaha! I’m just as scared as the next person. But, you know, there’s also a part of me that doesn’t really care that much. Which is genuinely liberating. And I don’t know if that’s because of my parents or because I’m trying to find something else to do other than acting. I don’t know, but I just don’t care. And I have to go with that.”

He didn’t like being pigeonholed as the son of George C. Scott, famous actor, or as the Broadway star Colleen Dewhurst’s boy. “But that didn’t last long. And now, you know, they’re dead. And I miss them. So it’s different.” Scott says that as he gets older he can see his father in some of his performances, and that this can be reassuring to him, in a cyclical, spiritual, life-goes-on kind of way. “Though I certainly never try to steal schtick from him,” he says, “but then again, I think he’s good, so maybe I do.”

Meanwhile Scott is more concerned with his burgeoning career as a director. He first co-directed the food- obsessed comedy Big Night in 1996, followed in 2000 by a Hamlet adaptation which was a “must-see”, according to The New York Times, though Scott, infuriatingly, describes it as “a failure”. He then went solo with the experimental mind-bender Final and the Terrence Malick-inspired melodrama Off the Map.

He says that directing, more than acting, drains him of energy, and that he needs to choose his projects wisely to have enough time to spend with his seven-year-old son (Scott is divorced). He concludes by suggesting that, just like his approach to acting, if he ever feels that he’s getting comfortable with directing he will simply move on to the next obsession. But isn’t this a bit futile? To keep striving for something that’s just over the horizon? (Explodes) “Jesus! You sound like Beckett now! Yes, of course it’s futile! That’s life isn’t it? I can’t go on, I shall go on! What does he say?”

Fail, and fail better? “Fail better? Yes. Kurosawa would say that, right? This is a guy who, at 85, said ‘I’m just figuring it out’. He’s made some of the greatest movies ever! Ever! And he says, ‘I’m just getting the hang of this’. That’s kinda cool, isn’t it?” Spoken like a true anti-star.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• Oscars

• Cannes

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette