Screen test

For a newly minted graduate working at a big bank, poring over movie scripts and watching film trailers on the sly is one risky way to employ your on-the-clock hours. But for David Raymond, a banker-turned-screenwriter-and-movie-star, those lazy days in the office appear to have been time well spent.

In 2006, Raymond, 27, took the leading role in his self-penned debut, Heroes and Villains, a romantic comedy about a group of London ne'er-do-wells who launch an agency that specializes in setting up traps to catch philandering partners. Now he's putting the finishing touches on his second script, a biopic of Robert Clive, a.k.a. Clive of India, the military commander who established East India Co. in southern India and Bengal in the 18th century. Guess who he has in mind to play Clive?

It's all a million miles from Raymond's former desk in the capital markets division of Royal Bank of Scotland, where he worked for two years before quitting to tout his movie project.

Heroes' limited November release in the U.K. saw it savaged by the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, who contended that the film brought him "close to hospitalization with sheer incredulity." Raymond, however, has no regrets: "Film was always something I'd dreamed of doing. I could never do anything different."