Brian Cox's face is almost too good to be true. As we sit in the Shelbourne Hotel discussing his latest role in Jim Sheridan's The Boxer, Brian is constantly kneading his face with his hands. His chin sinks down into the jowls of his neck when he makes a point, and he plays with the flesh around his eyes like pizza dough as he gets worked up about the movie. He's a good interviewee, openly answering all my questions in his growling voice that has just a hint of his Dundee birthplace still in it.
Only a slight sidewise glance towards the phone every now and then betrays the fact that he's waiting to hear about a movie that he may or may not be shooting the following week in Los Angeles.
Such are Brian Cox's large frame, craggy face and innate gravitas that it would take a fairly rash casting director to offer him anything other than the most serious of roles. Although he has spent a lifetime playing many of the great roles in many of the great theatres, many people still identify him with his stunning performance in Michael Mann's cult thriller, Manhunter.
It is precisely the air of guarded menace he can bring to a role that makes him so right for the part of Joe Hamill, the IRA head honcho, in The Boxer. Although Joe is variously seen as a loving father and grandfather, a man working towards a peace settlement and a rallying force in the community, there is no mistaking the pragmatic violence that is never far from the surface.
"The part really interested me as it is at the moral centre of the movie. Joe is the one who is dealing with reality and the aspirations of a community that is tired of violence. He is also tired himself, he's weary of the violent road. Yet what I knew I must show is his implacable quality - he will do cruel acts if that is what needs to be done."
Afterwards, the photographer, who is clicking away as we talk, comments that the expression on his face as he says this last line is blood-chilling - just for a second he is completely the godfather and you can understand why Jim Sheridan felt he needed him in the film.
Brian Cox did not stumble into acting. He started at 15 at his local theatre, went to drama school in London at 17 and calculates that he has been a member of Equity for 37 years. The work has been pretty constant, although he jokes that he always missed the fashionable thing.
"I was 10 years too late for the Albert Finney and Alan Bates generation, and the wrong class for the Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews generation. Always a bit out of kilter really."
His career really took off when he was in his late 30s - perhaps when he grew into his craggy looks. Both Rat In The Skull and Strange Interlude in which he co-starred with Glenda Jackson in London, transferred to New York and he got the part in Manhunter as the result. Although his first love was the cinema, he worked predominantly in the theatre, as both actor and director, for 20 years.
"I think it's a very British thing. The theatre tradition is so strong and it gets inculcated into you from your college days. Certainly, my interest was initially in the cinema. When I got to drama school, I began to understand about the theatre, about Laurence Olivier and so on. They were great days - the start of Tony Hopkins and Derek Jacobi and I was lucky to be part of it. However, I decided a couple of years ago that I really wanted to concentrate on my career in the cinema - I wanted to do what I dreamed of as a kid."
This meant a move to Los Angeles, where he now has a home, and five films in quick succession including Renny Harlin's The Long Kiss Goodnight, Michael Caton-Jones's Rob Roy and Mel Gibson's Braveheart. This celluloid spree was interrupted by the arrival of a script for a one-man stage show by a very young playwright - Conor McPherson, who also wrote the script for Paddy Breathnach's film, I Went Down.
"It was terrible. I was in the middle of my Hollywood phase and the script for St Nicholas arrived. It wasn't that I couldn't put it down, I couldn't pick it up. I had looked at it and seen it was just one character and thought `Oh Jesus, I can't do this', so it lay on my bed for months. It's funny though, I knew the moment I saw it I was going to do it and I was just putting it off because it was so enormous.
"That is the great joy of my job - the pearls, when they come, are so great. There aren't many and nor should there be, because that is the nature of the beast; the majority of the time you have to just follow your mercenary calling and draw your wages."
It is obvious from the way he speaks of St Nicholas that he considers it one of the pearls, and he is not alone. When it opened in London's Bush Theatre, the play and Cox in particular drew rave reviews, and it is moving to "just off Broadway" in March. Brian Cox himself raves about Conor McPherson - in fact, most atypically for a luvvie, I find it hard to drag him back to the subject of himself.
"Conor is just incredible. At first it was a little unnerving being directed by someone so young, but only because he would probe me all the time and say things like: `You're a bit like that really aren't you? Yes you are.' He gave me so much advice and I just adore him."
The other person that inspires Cox to paeans of praise is Jim Sheridan, whom he describes as: "Just wonderful, the most organic director, one of the best. He creates this amazing atmosphere in which the actors are actually creative, unlike some films where you just feel like camera fodder. I had never worked that way, with a director that was so completely open."
Much has been made of Sheridan's knack of allowing certain characters to evolve and encouraging actors to improvise. Brian is living proof of this, as his character Joe Hamill did not exist in the original script.
Yet Jim Sheridan still wanted to meet him: "There was some question of me being considered for Gerry McSorley's part, but I think that was just a blind. When I did eventually meet Jim we talked for about three hours until he just said `Will you trust me on this one?'. I think he'd been originally put on to me by Dan Day Lewis - I was going to work with him on Michael Mann's Last Of The Mohicans but I was working on something else. In the end, Joe Hamill just developed as a character as filming progressed.
"It made for some unusual scenes. The final one between myself and Daniel was the scene they showed at the Golden Globes for which we were nominated. Kevin Kline came up and was going `Great scene Brian' and then Jeff Goldblum the same - I had to tell them all that I was in New York and Daniel was in Dublin when we shot that scene. I love that kind of film-making, it's so very Orson Welles."
Brian Cox is predominantly based in Los Angeles now, but insists he doesn't want to become one of those "exiled Brits" and indeed, he has many ties to this side of the globe. His daughter Margaret is in Trinity and his son Alan Cox is a respected actor; Brian and his wife divorced in the early 1980s.
At the end of the interview, I ask him what he plans on next, and he sighs deeply before rubbing his face with a huge hand. His cowboy boots, which he is rather incongruously wearing with flannel trousers and a Kelly-green poloneck, are propped up on the window sill and he gazes out on to Stephen's Green.
"Well I'm doing St Nicholas for the next month and after that, I guess I'll just go whichever way the wind sends me."