Wherever you go these days, you can't miss James Nesbitt. Even if you missed him in the television series Cold Feet or Playing the Field, or in the film Waking Ned, you can hardly switch on your TV set without catching him striding across Northern Ireland in the current British Telecom advertisement, or slugging back Guinness's bizarre-looking new "white" beer, Breo. "I think my mother's having problems, seeing me so much on the telly," says the Coleraine-born actor, whose puckish face seems to have become the epitome of Irish maleness in recent months.
"The BT ads seem to have a bizarrely large impact, People are constantly coming up to me on the street and giving me one penny. I think Northern Ireland is such a small village that BT were looking for someone who was half recognisable from home, and who was sort of accessible. "With the Breo ads, I knew the director, Declan Lowney, who did the first series of Cold Feet. I think he pushed for me, but then the agency hopped on board. There's three of them in the can, but I'd love to do more."
He admits he enjoys making commercials, and not just for the excellent money. "The process is very different from television these days, because it's very exacting. You can be on take 35, with someone asking you to say `and' differently. "It's quite similar to film acting, in a way, in that it's very disciplined. There used to be a snobbery about commercials, which has dissipated in recent years. Of course, you can argue that you shouldn't be attaching yourself to a certain product or whatever. But then I think to myself, `Bollocks, I've got a daughter . . .' "
The fact is, though, that commercials are frequently the best things on telly these days, I suggest. "Yeah, that's exactly right, although, on the Cold Feet series I'm doing at the minute, the director is a young guy called Tom Hooker, whose background is entirely in commercials, and he's brought an incredibly filmic vision to the whole thing because of that."
Kirk Jones, the director of Waking Ned, in which Nesbitt plays the lovelorn young suitor with a body odour problem, also learned his trade in advertising. "Yes, Kirk came from a completely commercials background, and I actually shot a charity commercial with him a few weeks ago for this millennium appeal, asking everyone to give their final hours' salary of 1999 for the children of the next millennium. "You can see that style in Waking Ned, which is shot in a very beautiful, sort of TV commercial way."
Was he surprised at the huge success of Waking Ned, particularly in America? "I'm surprised it took $30 million, and I'm gutted I wasn't on profit points. But it's not that big a surprise, really, especially in America. "I know there's been a fair amount of criticism of it, especially in the Irish press, and I suppose I can understand that, but I think it's a nice wee film. It's full of warmth and quirkiness and humour, and I love the fact that the two central characters are these old guys."
Not surprisingly, Waking Ned has led to a lot more scripts and offers coming in from the US. "I'd go and work there for a few months, but I have no intention of living there. I'm living in England and I miss Ireland, so God knows what I'd be like if I was in America."
Since making his big-screen debut in the 1991 comedy Hear My Song, Nesbitt has appeared in films as diverse as the Bosnian-set war drama Welcome to Sarajevo and the Thomas Hardy adaptation Jude (both under the direction of Michael Winterbottom. He's reluctant to pick out any particular favourites. "I wouldn't choose something that I didn't think was going to be good. I loved the experience of working on Welcome to Sarajevo, and I loved the role in Resurrection Man, although it received such a critical backlash."
Resurrection Man, based on the novel by Eoin McNamee, was widely criticised for its violent depiction of a loyalist murder gang in the 1970s. "I thought that reaction was classically Northern Irish, to tell you the truth," says Nesbitt. "I feel that there's an awful fear of confronting the immediacy of one's past in Northern Ireland. They'll happily accept Tarantinoesque violence but not the truth on their own doorsteps. "The film was only reflecting, not creating. It was closely based on what happened in the 1970s, but we were being blamed for creating this situation, as opposed to making a piece of art that reflected it."
The accusation, though, was that the film glamorised some of the most brutal acts of violence of the Troubles. "There may be some truth in that, but I think if anyone studied Lenny Murphy, who was the original Shankill Butcher, he was actually a glamour boy. "What I hated was when people said, `Oh it's terribly unfair on the relatives of the victims, it's going to dredge it all up for them'. That's an extraordinary arrogance. "Those people probably get up every morning and remember what happened to their relatives - the last thing they need to remind them is a film. There was, I thought, a very dangerous form of censorship going on around that film - all the cinemas in Northern Ireland, bar one, refused to show it."
Growing up in Coleraine, Nesbitt used to compete in singing competitions as a child, which led to his involvement in the local theatre company, appearing in productions of Oliver and Pinocchio before setting of for an ill-fated stint at university. "When I packed in university, my parents asked me what I was going to do. I just told them I was going to act, because it was the first thing that came out of my mouth. But I wasn't desperate to act; just sick of writing essays about existentialism."
He certainly hasn't been short of work in the past few years, but still refuses to take it too seriously. "I think of acting as a hobby - it doesn't drive me. I'm getting paid to do what I like doing, but it's not really my vocation. Well . . . maybe that's not completely true. "That's not to say that I'm not ambitious or competitive, because I am, but if I had to stop acting right now, it wouldn't kill me, which I think is quite a healthy position to be in - that I'm just doing something I like doing."
A lot of that work has been on television; a couple of months ago he was simultaneously appearing in two of the most popular drama series on British TV - the women's football drama Playing the Field and the romantic comedy series Cold Feet. Many actors fear that successful television roles can typecast them in the eyes of the public, but Nesbitt has been careful to spread his workload. "I constantly feel I'm falling into job after job. I've been very lucky. Over the course of the last two years I've played some very diverse, different characters."
Cold Feet, in particular, seems to be the nearest British television has yet come to that holy grail of the 1990s, a successful ensemble thirtysomething series. "Oh, I definitely think so. It's a gap that was waiting to be filled for a long time, and it's a very clever piece of television. It's kind of blatant in its commerciality a lot of the time, but it's also quite intelligent." Right now, he's in the middle of filming the second series - a third has already been approved, but he won't be appearing in it. "I'm moving on to other stuff, and I want to spend some more time with my family. I also think two series is enough to do. "I'll definitely not take on another series in a good while, because they're tiring and they go on for ever, but I loved doing it, and it was great for me to be playing an Englishman."
At the moment he's simultaneously shooting Cold Feet in Manchester and co-starring with Helena Bonham Carter in a film called Women Talking Dirty, set in Edinburgh. "I'm kind of knackered, to tell you the truth," he admits. "I was shooting in Edinburgh yesterday, which is why I have a dreadful hangover today. After Cold Feet, I'm doing another movie, but I think of Cold Feet as six one-hour films anyway, because they're put together in such a cinematic way. In the last 10 weeks I've had three days off, including the weekends, which is just mental."
He plans to take some time off later in the year to be with his one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. "Half the idea of taking on all this work was that I'd be able to do that. It's hard, though, if you're offered something, to say `No'. "I'm aware of how precarious the whole thing is, and how lucky I am to be working. I've obviously got that Protestant, Ulster work ethic thing, constantly worrying about where the next loaf's coming from."