Why Kelly MacDonald's First Animation Was Tough

Kelly MacDonald picked quite the animated to be her first, as Brave is animation film giant Pixar's first flick with a female protagonist. She talked to ET about the challenging gap between voice acting and her usual acting for a film or Boardwalk Empire.

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"It was quite challenging," MacDonald admitted of her first animated film. "Animation is...not like [the] acting I've ever known before. I'm quite a subtle performer...With animation, you can't do that. Everything has to be amplified and more. The simplest breath, you have to multiply by ten."

Despite the initial challenge of altering her usual acting style to suit the animation, the Scottish actress said that she acclimated after a while. "Once I got into the swing of it, it was really liberating and I had fun with it and I got more confident," she said.

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During her busy day promoting the film, ET caught up later with MacDonald at the premiere of the film and found out her thoughts about playing the voice of Pixar's first female protagonist.

"Pixar are just making great movies about great characters, whether they're cars or toys or fish. It never occurred to me that they're hadn't been a lead female but...having said that, I'm really delighted that I get the privilege," she said.

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Unlike MacDonald, her fellow Scottish co-star Craig Ferguson isn't new to animation voice roles (How to Train Your Dragon, Winnie the Pooh); he explained what attracted him to this role other than the animated setting in Scotland.

"To be a part of something of this kind of quality," Ferguson listed as one of his reasons for signing on to the project. "Pixar...is an A-list thing and then to play a cantankerous middle-aged man is no stretch for me at all," he said to laughs from co-star Kevin McKidd.

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McKidd, who plays "Owen" on Grey's Anatomy, was proud of the film's setting in his native Scotland. "It's really lovely to see a story set in Scotland," he said, "even though it's kind of a fictionalized version of Scotland; it's a magical version of Scotland."

Check out all the interviews from the voices of Brave, which is in theaters this Friday (June 22), in the video above.