The career of Ciarán Hinds, who plays Julius Caesar in Rome, has been shaped by good fortune, he tells Daniel McLaughlin in London.
He stars as Julius Caesar in a new BBC blockbuster and has just finished shooting with Steven Spielberg, but success has not slain the demon of self-doubt in Ciarán Hinds. "It's always a battle and, some days, you're just hanging on by your fingertips," he says, gripping the edge of the table in a London hotel. "At times you just want to run into a corner and bury your face and call for your mummy and daddy. You have to concentrate on what you're doing, but behind that it's a game of convincing yourself, and then others, about who you might be on a particular day. But in my work, the most important thing you have to do is not lose your bottle." He releases the table, sits back and sips his coffee with a steady hand.
"Other days, of course, it's the most wonderful job, and you work with great people, very open people, in some lovely parts of the world."
He spent eight months in the Italian capital filming Rome, an 11-part, €100 million series for US channel HBO and the BBC, which has transfixed the tabloids with its vision of a cruel and squalid Eternal City ruled by mostly violent, lustful aristocrats.
"The idea of being offered the part of Caesar you laugh at, you think 'C'mon that's just silly', and then you think it's quite an honour to be chosen to play it," says Hinds. "And then you think, 'Oh shit I've got to do it', and then, well, 'I suppose someone has to do it!'"
For Hinds, Rome is the culmination of an extraordinary career surge that has carried the Belfast actor from being a well-respected film, theatre and television all-rounder to something approaching a fully-fledged star.
Since completing Rome, he has worked with Steven Spielberg on his controversial next movie, Munich, and with Michael Mann on the big-screen version of his 1980s television hit, Miami Vice.
"It has been busy, working in between Malta and Budapest [for the Spielberg film] and nipping over to Miami for some final night shoots . . . It was a great thrill to work with Michael Mann and to find yourself thrown into a scene with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. You just think 'What's going on?!'"
Farrell and Foxx, the stars of Miami Vice, are the latest in a long line of leading actors to work alongside the 52-year-old Hinds. He starred with Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect and later Calendar Girls; with Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider 2; with Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition and Cate Blanchett in Veronica Guerin.
Hinds marks out Hanks and Blanchett as two of the leading actors of their generation. "She's special," he says, in a soft Belfast brogue. "Brilliant. She takes on roles and is brave and takes risks and is truthful. Absolutely superb." His part as John Traynor in Veronica Guerin emerged, as Hinds says many of his roles have, from a sprawling network of friends and acquaintances that has evolved during 30 years of work, from his days at RADA in London in the early 1970s.
"I happened to be in Dublin doing a play and Joel Schumacher happened by chance to be there planning Veronica Guerin, and he asked to see me, because he had seen me in a play in New York play five years earlier. Because of that, he later offered me a part in The Phantom of the Opera. So one thing leads to another, or doesn't, and these chance, circumstantial meetings with people have been the way a lot of my life seems to have been."
Another such meeting, with Sam Mendes, took him from his breakthrough stage appearance as Mendes's Richard III to the role of Finn McGovern in the British director's bleak Road to Perdition, alongside the likes of Hanks, Paul Newman and Jude Law.
"Of course it hits you sometimes who you're working with," says Hinds, taking off a flat cap of green tweed and smoothing back his dark hair. "But you're really just working, only it's on a bigger scale.
"I've always been a day-to-day person. I know the nature of life and have a lot of friends who haven't had as many breaks as I have, and I just accept that for the moment I haven't got the short straw. But as soon as I do something that doesn't work out, or the things you've tried to cover up, the flaws start to appear through the work, then you can get discarded and things go a different way. That's the way it seems to be."
A change in professional fortunes seems to hold little fear for Hinds. He was already 40 years old when his Richard III piqued the interest of film and television producers, having spent much of a decade at Glasgow's renowned Citizens' Theatre, with occasional work in London, Dublin and Belfast.
"I didn't have an agent for six years because I was never really part of the London scene, I was just moving around, keeping going, heading where the work was."
And for a Belfast boy in the 1970s, London was not the friendliest place to be. "I arrived with a chip on my shoulder. I grew up in a mixed area of North Belfast, saw the mayhem that was happening and wondered what I was doing over here [in London]. I was carrying around resentment about what was going on back home.
"But it was so good to be among people of my own age, who wanted to know what was going on, who weren't responsible for it, didn't know what's in the psyche and what's driving things in Ireland, and wanted to talk about it. It opened me up to a different way of thinking."
His horizons continued to expand, and his time with Peter Brook's multi-national theatre company in Paris introduced him to his partner, Vietnamese-born actress Helene Patarot, with whom he has a 13-year-old daughter, Aoife.
They live in Paris and Hinds flew home as often as possible while shooting Rome at that city's legendary Cinecitta studios, and from Malta and Budapest filming with Spielberg.
In Munich, Spielberg tells the story of a secret Israeli hit squad dispatched to find and kill Palestinian guerrillas who are accused of planning the kidnapping of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Eleven Israelis died in that attack.
The revenge missions across Europe and the Middle East - Israel's first "targeted killings" - are still deeply controversial, and the film's reported focus on the ambivalent feelings of the hitmen towards their work has made some Jewish groups nervous.
"At this stage of his life he doesn't have to put himself up to be hit," says Hinds. "But for me it is a very moral film, and that's what he wants to make. At the heart of it is a horror of what happens when people don't budge. But whatever he feels about what has gone on, is going on and will go on [in the Middle East], why don't we look at it? There is always someone ready to say 'No - wrong!' but he wants to make this film."
As the project took shape, Spielberg invited Hinds to Los Angeles. "We had a half-hour meeting and I was struck by how warm and personable he was," says Hinds. He called me and asked what I thought [of the script]. I made a few suggestions and he said it was nice to meet and that he'd get back to me by the end of the week. So the end of the week came and my agent said he'd like you to do it! You never really know why they choose you but, again, there must be some sort of connection."
Munich is set for release in North America in December but, for now, audiences will be seeing a lot more of Hinds as Julius Caesar. Rome has been a huge success in the US, and is set to make a similar splash on this side of the Atlantic, after raising a few eyebrows with its occasionally graphic depiction of imperial rulers at play.
"What, you've never seen a naked man or woman before . . . there's a bit of humping going on, though not a lot? It's not at all pornographic and it is very witty. It is really about Rome - the people, bottom up, the street, dirt, brutality, slavery, going up through the aristocracy to the top."
Hinds compares the sheer scale and momentum of Rome to an "elephant on rollerskates - you've just got to hang on to the tail", but is braced for any reversal of his burgeoning good fortune.
"This could be the start of something or the end or the middle or whatever, and I have no control over that," he says with a smile, gathering up his things as he heads for the Eurostar train back to Paris. "I am looking forward to getting back to domestic life," he nods. "I know what's waiting for me - some ironing, a little hoovering, and no doubt a bit of babysitting."
Rome begins on BBC2 next Wednesday