Until quite recently Dominic West was a stranger to the general public. Since leaving drama school in 1996 he has appeared in several notable plays, worked on a couple of Shakespeare films and made himself something of a go-to-guy when it came to casting the obnoxious British boyfriend in American romantic comedies. But in spite of some excellent reviews, he was essentially the kind of actor who would leave audiences as he found them, none the wiser as to who he was.
Seven years ago, West left England and went to work in the American backwater of Baltimore on a TV cop series being put together by the writer David Simon with no recognisable stars or famous names. In Britain it was screened on the obscure satellite outpost of the FX channel and registered viewing figures of around 30,000. Nor was it a great deal more popular in America. Among the tiny audience, however, was a small army of adoring critics, several of whom went so far as to proclaim the series the best TV drama in history. Word of mouth spread, a DVD audience grew, and it became a cult phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic. The show was called The Wire and it has made West if not quite a name, then known.
The Wire told the story of a group of detectives locked in a doomed battle with inner-city drug warlords. The narrative was multilayered, featuring scores of characters, and it eschewed easy resolutions. But nothing in the plot could rival the amazing knowledge that Detective McNulty, the hard-drinking, bed-hopping, working-class Irish-American and star of the ensemble, was in fact played by an Englishman, and not just any Englishman, but that most curious and mythologised of creatures: an Old Etonian. West inhabited the part of Jimmy McNulty so fully and convincingly that it seemed as if he'd been rehearsing for it his whole life. In fact, he sent in a self-made audition tape - 'a Robert De Niro impression, really' - on spec at the last minute. Within a few days he was flown to America, where he spent a couple of weeks trailing Baltimore cops. Then he shot the pilot.
As the de facto lead, West effectively had to carry the first season. If he hadn't seemed authentic, the whole show would have failed. And though he says he never really understood the Baltimore accent, which is a hybrid of north and south, he had natives commend him on his accuracy.
'Originally they wanted Ray Winstone,' says West. 'But I think he turned them down because he didn't want to live in Baltimore for five years. Maybe they were desperate or maybe I did a great tape. I don't know.'
Now back in London, West lives with Catherine FitzGerald and their two-year-old daughter and baby boy in Shepherd's Bush. FitzGerald is the former Countess Durham, and daughter of Desmond FitzGerald, the Knight of Glin. West had a previous relationship with Polly Astor, granddaughter of Lord Astor, with whom he has a nine-year-old daughter.
All the aristocratic connections might suggest the Old Etonian really is a member of some gilded elite. And as previous interviewers have tended to make much of his upper-class tones, I was prepared to meet a man who sounded like a mixture of Donald Sinden and Henry Blofeld. But, in fact, his voice is not really posh at all. It's his language, not his accent, that's fruity. He swears with the same boundless ease that McNulty - catchphrase: 'What the fuck did I do wrong?' - brought to the business of casual profanity.
There's nothing grand about his house - a spacious but unexceptional London terrace - or the man. Is he, then, more Roundhead than Cavalier?
'Do you mean am I circumcised?' he quips.
The question is pertinent because he is soon to appear as Oliver Cromwell in the Channel 4 four-part drama The Devil's Whore, with co-stars John Simm as a fellow Roundhead and Peter Capaldi as Charles I. Created by playwright Peter Flannery, who wrote the Bafta-winning Our Friends in the North, and directed by Marc Munden, whose Iraq war drama The Mark of Cain made headlines last year, The Devil's Whore is a Civil War tale of love and death.
'I suppose I'd have gone for the dissolute Cavaliers over the miserable Roundheads, but now I know a bit more about it, that New Model Army was astonishing.'
Cromwell, of course, is the great hate figure of Irish history, and therefore presumably not the easiest of people to portray for someone, like West, who comes from an Irish Catholic background. 'Yeah,' he says, 'my mum still won't speak to me. And my missus, she's not Catholic, but she is Irish. We're getting married in Ireland just after it comes out, which means she'll be going through town with Oliver Cromwell. That'll go down a treat.'
There were two things, he says, that first interested him in Cromwell. That he did nothing before he was 40 - 'and I thought that was encouraging' - (West turned 39 two weeks ago) and he cancelled Christmas, 'which is not a bad idea'. He says he set out to make Cromwell 'an evil bastard', but by the end of his research he had revised his opinion. 'I became crazy about him. I mean he was a complete fucking bastard in Ireland, but in every other way he was really rather extra-ordinary. And Ireland can be explained as a sort of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He hit Drogheda and Wexford so hard he made the rest of Ireland surrender straight away.'
Engagingly down to earth, West likes to laugh, a great big guffaw of amusement, and most often at his own expense. Noting that McNulty was no friend of sobriety, and that West's rom-com boyfriends have also tended to have a taste for the booze, I asked why he'd been cast so often as a drunk.
'I think because I am one. Eventually when you've been cast for the 10th time as a drunk arsehole, you have to start thinking [he adopts a neurotic American accent] maybe I should take a look at myself. It's the same with interviews - maybe this will be a rare exception - you read them and think, "God, they've made me sound like such an arsehole." Then you think, "Mmm... every time?"'
In reality, West is something of a wine connoisseur, though he argues that the description is simply a synonym for 'a drunk'. He tells an anecdote about writing to the wine critic Robert Parker, 'the world's greatest nose', who is a Baltimore inhabitant, with the intention of interviewing him for a British wine magazine.
'He said: "You can do that if you want but, if you can get a few members of the cast together, I'd much rather take you out to this restaurant in Baltimore, and I always bring my own wine." So we went out with Bubbles [the actor Andre Royo], who drank Jack and coke all night, with these most sensational wines, all in magnums, David Simon [creator of The Wire], Sonja [Sohn, who played Kima] came, and I think Wendell [Pierce who was McNulty's partner 'Bunk']. We had this astonishing dinner. I can't remember anything about it, I was so plastered. All I do remember is that at the end there were still these half-full magnums of this incredible wine. So we said, "See you Bob," and walked him outside; "Thanks a lot Bob," and then as he went round the corner, we went, "Quick, let's get that wine!"'
Unusually for an actor, he is taller than he appears on screen, but his wide, mischievous grin and sardonic humour conform to McNulty's dimensions. The baby had been the cause of a prolonged bout of sleep deprivation and West was not about to wax lyrical about the joys of a newborn. 'Boys just burp and fart and make this noise in your ear all night,' he complained. 'It's like sleeping with Rab C Nesbitt.'
I asked him why he thought no terrestrial channel had picked up The Wire in Britain. 'I don't know,' he mused.
'I always blamed it on there being far too many black people. We should have had more white people and we would have been a glorious success and won loads of Emmys.'
The point, that shouldn't require explaining, is that he thinks no such thing. On the contrary, he had felt self-conscious when he joined up with the show, not so much because he was an Englishman playing a guy from Baltimore but because he was a white man playing what was effectively the lead in a largely black show.
'It was always accepted that you had to have a white lead,' he says, 'otherwise no one would watch it. I felt a bit uncomfortable about that, or more uncomfortable than I did being a Brit stealing an American job. But it was always a great atmosphere among the actors. Among the principals, we all had the same trailer. We all got treated like shit. We were all subordinate to the writing.'
He speaks about his years on The Wire with obvious affection, like someone recalling a beautiful land to which they know they'll never return. There has been some talk about making a feature film but David Simon has said that if it were ever made, it would have to be a prequel. 'That's OK for the black characters,' says West, 'but I'd have to have a face lift.'
At the same time, he's relieved that the marathon is over. He had to spend half of each year in Baltimore and though he liked the city, it left him a long way from his daughter with the London-based Astor. At the end of every season he'd tell Simon he didn't think he could do another. 'David would have to try to persuade me, you know, offer me loads more sex scenes. Half those sex scenes were to try and keep me quiet.'
Perhaps the most memorable of those scenes was the one in which an undercover McNulty adopted the guise of an English punter in a brothel. What made it particularly enjoyable for British viewers was that McNulty's English accent made Dick Van Dyke sound like David Dimbleby.
Like The Sopranos, the series to which it was most often compared, The Wire featured a number of in-jokes. One of the minor characters, a detective named Ed Norris, was played by the real-life Baltimore police commissioner, also called Ed Norris. Many of his lines were complaints about the uselessness of the top brass. Norris was later sent to jail on charges of corruption, but returned to the show on his release. His successor also made a number of appearances.
Despite The Wire's portrayal of police inadequacies, the Baltimore police loved the show and were very supportive of the production and cast. 'I always thought actors were - and I think they are a bit in this country - slightly frivolous people in a slightly frivolous job,' says West. 'And you always think that when you come across real people doing real jobs, like the police, they'll be slightly contentious. But they never are, particularly in America. They can't get enough of it,' he exclaims. 'Utter media whores, all of them.'
Even in Britain the police have expressed their admiration to West. On one occasion, he was stopped in Queen's Park tube by a policeman. 'Straight away I checked myself for drugs,' jokes West, as he mimes patting his pockets. It turned out the officer worked, like McNulty, on the surveillance of drug dens. 'He said, "We don't have the resources, though, we just wish we had your resources." The whole show is about how they haven't got any fucking resources!'
West grew up in a wealthy Catholic family in a village on the outskirts of Sheffield. His father, who owned a plastics factory, decided to send his youngest son to Eton. He was terrified, he says, of returning to Sheffield during the holidays and being asked where he went to school. 'It used to be excruciating.'
At Eton, he fell under the influence of Robert Freedman, the head of the drama department, and an English master named Raef Pane, who cast him as Hamlet.
'He was [Ring of Bright Water author and naturalist] Gavin Maxwell's lover, I think, or certainly a good friend,' recalls West. 'He was a civilised, passionate teacher of English literature and so obsessed with boys, but not in a sexual way. He just loved boys and loved teaching. And that's what makes it an extraordinary school really, that you have these guys that are so passionate. I remember him saying, "Of course, you've got to do this as a profession." It had never occurred to me that it could be a job or something I could get paid for.'
After Eton, he went to Trinity College in Dublin, where he studied English. Dublin was a liberation, he says, because it was so far removed from Eton. 'The Irish were fascinated by the idea [of the public school]. "What goes on there? Do yous fock each other?" They rather liked it. And the girls loved it.'
He appeared in a short film, while at university, and got paid for the first time. Almost without thinking, he knew that this was the life he wanted to lead. He also met Catherine FitzGerald at Trinity. As he told an American interviewer last year: '[She's] my girlfriend from university days. She dumped me back then and she married someone else, and now we're on the rebound and we're back together.'
From Trinity he went to the Guildhall to study drama, and he hasn't been out of work since graduating. 'I remember being mystified whenever people said, "What are you going to do?" and I said, "Be an actor," and they'd say [deep theatrical voice], "Oh, it's very hard." Seems like a piece of piss to me,' he laughs. 'Hard's going to the fucking office. But no, I've been fairly lucky. Unfortunately it's been a tale of intense luck and privilege. But there you go.'
He joined the Peter Hall Company and within a few years he landed his first Hollywood rom-com, alongside Sandra Bullock in 28 Days. One successful actor who met West during this early period of his career recalls there being quite a buzz about him in the profession. At the time, the actor put it down to the time-honoured advantages of class, but he now pays testament to West's 'extraordinary' performance in The Wire, adding that 'he was also terrific in As You Like It [the 2005 Young Vic production, alongside Sienna Miller].'
Yet at the turn of the millennium, with stardom apparently within his grasp, West made an odd decision. He joined the circus. Not just any circus, it's true, but the acrobatic, avant-garde Argentinean circus De La Guarda. Still, it was a circus, and though Cary Grant and Burt Lancaster paid their dues under a big top, that was before they started acting. Elsewhere, West has spoken of his attraction to the physical discipline - he had to perform dance routines while suspended in the air by wire - but with me he spoke wistfully of the 'beautiful Argentinean dancers'.
Whatever motivated the decision, it showed a willingness to stray from the predictable course; a self-confidence or indifference to convention that also registers in his best work. By contrast, he can look as if he's going through the motions in films like the 2003 Julia Roberts vehicle Mona Lisa Smile, almost laughing at their generic limitations.
I assumed that he would have been bombarded with offers after The Wire, but he says that the best offers have come from American TV and he's not prepared to commit himself again for a long period. 'So I'm quite happy to play [disfigured villain] Jigsaw in Punisher for four really fun weeks in Montreal, rather than a really great part for six years in Baltimore.'
Often in Britain, he says, he's called in for parts only to find that the writers really just want to talk about The Wire.
In any case, though he enjoyed playing Cromwell, he says he doesn't much like acting in TV. 'Telly is a director's or writer's medium, but acting in telly is really boring because it's so repetitive and goes on for so long.' What he'd prefer to do is direct. He went behind the camera for episode seven of the final season of The Wire and relished the experience. He directed a scene which called for stunt cars, stunt police, stunt motorcyclists and a stunt helicopter. 'I thought I was Michael Bay [the blockbuster action director] for a bit. Oh it was fantastic. I'm desperate, desperate to do more.'
He's trying to get into directing American TV shows like Heroes, and is hopeful David Simon may give him a slot on his new series set in New Orleans. We talk about how far American TV drama at its best has moved in front of Britain's. 'I don't know what the fuck it is,' he says, 'so I hesitate to say. But I've met some TV producers here and a director or two and you can't fucking believe some of these people have a job. You really can't. Part of what The Wire is about is how shit floats to the top. Bloody hell, it's true.'
All of this is said less in anger than a kind of good-natured, amused rant. It's like a parody of McNulty, or perhaps the benign prototype that lent the character such appealing passion. Anyway, he tells me, there was 'fuck all' work going on. A few days later, I called him to check on some biographical details. 'I can't speak now,' he said, 'I'm dressed in a tight Regency outfit and I can't move.' Well, I thought, if that's his thing, who am I to judge? But it turned out that he was playing an evil butler in a Julian Fellowes film.
So much for unemployment. For those of us still struggling with withdrawal symptoms from The Wire, the good news is that, while we're unlikely to see Jimmy McNulty again, there's a lot more to come from Dominic West.