You've got to laugh

Liz Hoggard

PEOPLE BEHAVE better around Christopher Eccleston. Which is ironic, really, when he has a reputation for being bloody difficult. But there's something about the actor's elaborate, olde-worlde courtesy that makes you want to be a nicer person. He arrives backstage for an evening shoot after a long day of rehearsals for his starring role in Hamlet at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds (we've been warned not to push our luck with the photographs), but within minutes he's holding doors open, remembering the names of crew, even apologising that his "celebrity" interview is intruding on another actor's warm-up time: "No please, it's us who are in your way." It's unshowy, northern good manners and it rubs off. By the end of the shoot, the photographer and I are being almost hysterically polite towards one another.

So why the reputation? "I think I'm seen as a grumpy old sod, because I've played a lot of people who are troubled," Eccleston acknowledges. Certainly his recent film outings have cornered the market in dour masculinity - from the Duke of Norfolk in Elizabeth and General Robert Ford in Jimmy McGovern's Sunday, to Major Henry, in Danny Boyle's extraordinary new sci-fi thriller, 28 Days Later. These days he's rarely out of army uniform. But in the flesh, Eccleston, 38, is larky, boyish, spilling over with enthusiasm. Dressed in a low-key blue sweater and jeans, he could be the nice man who comes to fix your boiler. There's little sign of the sophisticated eroticism you see in his films, until he fixes you with an intense, penetrating stare. And, boy, does the camera like his face - from the demonically high cheekbones ("like a fallen gargoyle," he says) to the hooded eyes, which can switch from anger to sexual yearning in a millisecond.

Although he enjoys working with Danny Boyle (this is their third film outing after Shallow Grave), Eccleston admits he "fought like fuck" to keep his character in 28 Days Later from being a one- dimensional bully. "I wanted him to be a brutal pragmatist who loved his men on a spiritual level, the way men love each other in war." Based on an Alex Garland script, the film is set in post-apocalyptic Britain where a powerful "rage" virus has been unleashed accidentally by a group of animal rights activists, leaving only a handful of survivors. Eccleston plays the leader of a group of Manchester-based soldiers, who initially offers support, but later proves to be more sinister. He gives a typically compelling performance - violent, yet tender; macho, yet sexually ambiguous. "You want to create a problem for the audience so they enjoy themselves more."

In real life, Eccleston doesn't flirt. It's more interesting than that. He fixes you with his full attention, so you feel you must be very fascinating. As our photographer later observes, "He's incredibly receptive, and prepared to expose himself to everyone equally, but there's also a real sense of watchfulness. He is soaking up everything like a sponge."

But he is also holding himself in reserve. He knows not to give away anything too precious. Eccleston has always had a stormy relationship with the press, who respect his acting skills but are almost pathologically obsessed with his private life. (Current speculation has him linked to his Flesh and Blood co-star Emma Cunniffe). In the past he has cheerfully dismissed his love life as "a cavalcade of comedy", but ask for specific names, and he's liable to explode. These days, however, he's learning to deflect more. When we begin talking about screen sex - and, trust me, Eccleston's bedroom scenes with Nicole Kidman [The Others], Renee Zellwegger [A Price Above Rubies] and Kate Winslet [Jude] make it hard not to - he pauses, then says with a roguish grin. "I only take three minutes, and I can do it twice. I'm not good in bed, but I'm funny."

Considering that he tends to play character roles rather than the romantic lead, Eccleston has a huge fan base. Audiences sense he will never do anything false or flashy. They'll even tune in for more complex, issues- driven television dramas like Our Friends in The North, Hillsborough and Flesh and Blood just because he's in it. And if any actor can bring new energy to the bodice-ripper, it's Eccleston, though he can be tough when the work isn't up to scratch. "It's the way I was brought up." Although he loved McGovern's scripts for Cracker (which used a traditional police drama to tackle racism, homophobia and misogyny), he got himself written out of the series when his character, DCI Billborough, became a mere sidekick to Robbie Coltrane, cannily negotiating a famous death scene. He turned down roles in Peak Practice and Pie in the Sky and has regularly lambasted middle-class aspirational TV - "it's all vets, goats and doctors" - for disrespecting the audience.

You sense that success doesn't entirely suit Eccleston. Although Shallow Grave brought him cult status in 1994 f (playing David, the accountant- turned-mad-axe wielder), he later dismissed it as "superficial and thin, an example of style over content". He also turned down the role of Begbie in Boyle's follow-up, Trainspotting. When I suggest he was right not to get typecast as an Edinburgh psycho, he admits with some grace, "I wanted the other part [played by Ewan McGregor]. I thought I could be quite a convincing smackhead. But it worked out for the best. I couldn't imagine anyone but Bobby Carlyle playing the role of Begbie."

Michael Winterbottom's Jude (1996), based on the Hardy novel, was supposed to be Eccleston's breakthrough film. His performance, a wonderfully nuanced study of intellectual isolation, was a critical hit, but mainstream audiences stayed away (he still bears the scars, but suggests in 10 years it may well be regarded as a classic). Elizabeth was another near-miss. The film was Oscar-nominated but Eccleston feels that his character, the Duke of Norfolk, was reduced to a northern, pantomime caricature. "More like the Duke of Salford," his father quipped.

To everyone's surprise, Eccleston threw in his lot with Hollywood and went to star in the Nicolas Cage movie Gone in 60 Seconds in 1999, which resulted in another period of self-loathing. "It's a terrible film and a terrible performance." Last year, he played Nicole Kidman's soldier husband in The Others to fine reviews, but Eccleston has never seen the film. "It's all smoke and mirrors," he laughs, although he's quick to praise his co-star. "Nicole's a proper actor and was right up for it. You walked on the set and you could see how committed she was to what she was doing."

Eccleston tends to have warm relationships with actresses. But something went badly wrong on the pre-production of Patrice Chereau's recent film, Intimacy (later infamous for a real-life scene of fellatio). Eccleston was due to star with Kerry Fox, who played his girlfriend in Shallow Grave, but tensions between the two reached such a pitch that Eccleston left the project, to be replaced by Mark Rylance. Presumably what tore Fox and Eccleston apart was their similarity - they're both raw, intense actors who never compromise. But in a guarded interview before the film's release, Chereau admitted he had to let a previous actor go because it wouldn't have been fair to put Fox through such vulnerable sex scenes with someone who clearly loathed her - even someone who was prepared to make them look convincing on screen. Eccleston was never named explicitly, but it was damaging for all concerned.

By his own admission, Eccleston worked very little in the late Nineties. He turned down a role in Saving Private Ryan, and admits he was so eager he screwed up his audition for Terence Malik's The Thin Red Line. He also lost out on the role of the Bond villain to Robert Carlyle. But times have changed and Eccleston is on a roll. As well as playing Hamlet, in the eagerly anticipated debut by the West Yorkshire Playhouse's new artistic director, Ian Brown, he's got three films due out: 28 Days Later, the Danish arthouse movie I Am Dina with Gerard Depardieu, and A Revenger's Tragedy (Alex Cox's update of the Jacobean play, co-starring Eddie Izzard and Sophie Dahl). And there's more telly ahead, from Russell T Davies's new drama, The Second Coming, to a cameo in The League of Gentlemen.

Eccleston is passionate about TV. "I've always looked for things that don't tie up neatly at the end. TV is basically an art form, but we've lost that ambition. In the old days of Boys From The Blackstuff and all the Alan Clarke films, TV was writer-led, not actor-led. For me the writer is always king." In ITV's The Second Coming (out next year), he plays a man found wandering on the Yorkshire Moors convinced he's the son of God. "Talk about risky projects - I think it's fantastic," he says. But he is desperate to do more comedy. "I think comedy's harder than drama. We're tougher on people who make us laugh, and we're more grateful when they do." Despite cameos in Linda Green and 24 Hour Party People (as the down-and-out philosopher Boethius), casting directors persist in seeing him as too intense - "a class-avenging lout", as he once bluntly put it. Which is odd because Eccleston has a comedian's body, from the 6ft wiry frame (he runs marathons for charity) to comedy ears and knobbly knees. Only that beautiful face saves him from farce.

On the set of Elizabeth, he begged the costume designer to let him wear boots instead of tights "because I have the worst legs in British acting". The designer was adamant until she saw the knees: "OK, boots would be good." But then Eccleston has little personal vanity. "I haven't got traditional film actor's looks, thank God. I've got twin brothers, eight years older, with the same features, and if anybody taught me not to take myself seriously, it was them." He is also convinced that women viewers are more open-minded than Hollywood realises, embracing unusual-looking male leads such as Tim Roth, Mark Strong and Pete Postlethwaite.

For his own part, Eccleston has embraced screen nudity with little fuss. The sex scenes in Jude predictably aroused a storm from Hardy purists, but Eccleston is more affronted by the sexism surrounding the nudity. "I found it very demeaning that you couldn't see my cock and yet we were showing all of Kate [Winslet]. In a funny way it was humiliating for me as a fella, the fact that I was playing this man going through these terrible things in the film and you couldn't see his dick. I didn't like the fact that my body had to be protected, especially in that role because Jude is so exposed. But you know, I'd have had to have a hard-on because it's a sex scene - it's idiotic."

Born into a working-class Salford family (he moved back to Manchester from London several years ago), Eccleston credits his factory-worker parents with inspiring his passion for good writing. "They never watched soaps like Coronation Street - they just didn't see their own lives reflected there. I think that's probably where my passion for not talking down to the audience came from. I remember watching Spongers, a Jim Allen script filmed by Roland Joffe, as a family. It was absolutely shattering and part of that was seeing the effect it had on my dad. It taught me things about my family," he says, a noticeable lump in his throat.

Interestingly, Eccleston was a remedial reader at primary school. "I think the only reason was that I wasn't inspired. It was a bit humiliating to be marched out to our special class." A sympathetic teacher introduced him to Dr Seuss and more progressive American books, and by the age of 11 he had a reading age of 19. Today, he devours an eclectic mix of Primo Levi, Barry Hines and biographies of Caravaggio and Scorsese, but you sense that reading will never be a casual indulgence. (He is, he says, especially keen to get away from the awful school-textbook approach to Hamlet).

Leaving school in 1979, he went on to Salford Tech, where he picked up the acting bug. People assume he has had a meteoric rise, but after a drama degree at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London he spent much of the next seven years as a manual labourer with periods of "profound rejection". Most of the time, Eccleston admits, he was very angry. Finally, aged 29, he was cast as the learning-disabled teenager Derek Bentley (the last man in the UK to be hanged for murder) in the 1993 film, Let Him Have It. "They needed someone who was a nobody," he says wryly. Even as a nobody, Eccleston was still fighting to keep Derek real - "I was suddenly confronted with a piece of entertainment about a boy who was lying in a cemetery and we were going to make money out of him."

After the film, he stayed in contact with Derek's sister Iris, who successfully campaigned to get Bentley's conviction quashed before her death. And he's still close to Trevor Hicks (the campaigning father who lost two daughters in the 1989 tragedy at the Sheffield football stadium) after he played Hicks in Jimmy McGovern's Hillsborough. "Trevor's a friend. He's had quite a profound effect on me. He does on everyone he meets. To have survived that, and then to have been abused by the British judicial system in the way he was. When he was on his knees, he got kicked in the balls by the system. But he won't ever give up fighting."

Last year, Eccleston went back to the theatre to play Jean in a West End production of Miss Julie (another working-class hero, another study of sexual voyeurism), and found he loved the rhythm of stage acting. "Film is a director's medium, whereas on stage I get the final edit. It's also a healthier way of living because you're in one place." I remind him that he's always resisted Shakespeare up to now. "I think I said something a bit stronger than that," he grins.

Rehearsing Hamlet is fascinating, but terrifying, he says. Having never seen a production of the play before, he arrived two weeks before the other actors to do a crash course in technique - a humble gesture for a lead actor. "I understand every word I'm saying, so I hope the audience will." Although it's set in 1920s Eastern Europe, Ian Brown's production is deliberately TV-audience friendly. Along with Eccleston, Brown has cast Brigit Forsyth (Thelma from The Likely Lads) as Gertrude and Maxine Peake (Bubble from Dinnerladies) as Ophelia. The text has been substantially cut ("although the real, real guts are there") and so has Ophelia's hair. Eccleston reveals that Peake has shorn her blonde curls to escape any Pre-Raphaelite cliches in the madness scene. "She's got the same short, dark haircut as me." It is, he admits, a risky undertaking for all concerned. But it may give him the chance to flex his comedic muscles, after all. Eccleston is busy tapping into the dark, gallows humour of the text, and says that he's approaching Hamlet as "an apocalyptic stand-up comic" in the mould of Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks.

As our photo shoot continues, Eccleston becomes engagingly silly, partly to downplay his real seriousness about the role, partly to mask his shyness in front of the camera. We're treated to his impression of Eric Morecambe as Hamlet, and even Les Dawson who once dragged up in Elizabethan dress with a skull. "Oh, oh, oh, Ophelia, you're more than Delia," Eccleston warbles to an appreciative crowd. But the photographer's not convinced. She wants him moodier. "You don't like happy, do you?" grins Eccleston. But you have to admit she has a point. Those cheekbones just weren't made for comedy. E

`28 Days Later' is currently on general release. `Hamlet' runs until 30 November at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Quarry Hill, Leeds (0113 2137700)

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