Interview Gary Stevens: Keith Duggan meets a real-life track star who shows brilliant acting form in the role of Depression-era jockey legend George 'The Iceman' Woolf

Ah, this actor's life. Gary Stevens, sometime champion jockey and novice thespian in a film that has fallen across traumatised America like a comfort blanket, nestles in a corner of Goffs in Co Kildare. It is close to midnight and a frost has set across the Curragh and the American tinkles the ice in his whiskey glass. Because this is thoroughbred horse country and because the faces around are familiar to him and because this weekend he gets to relax in the old country, Stevens is feeling good. Warmed, and not just by the malt.

Thursday night was the first Irish screening of Seabiscuit, the film of the book of the tale of the half-forgotten Depression era racehorse that has, for some reason, become emblematic of a voice that Americans forgot they needed to hear.

It is an unashamedly old-fashioned film, lush and big-hearted and galloping along to a yarn that from the start illuminates its intention to leave you with a lump in your throat and then goes right ahead and does just that.

"You don't throw a whole life away just 'cause it's banged up a little," is the statement around which the story is spun. For decades, Seabiscuit was to American racing just history, a bronze sculpture at the Santa Anita racetrack in southern California. But Laura Hillenbrand's totemic book and now Gary Ross's film has catapulted what was a fond but vaguely remembered American sporting icon into something of a national treasure. And Stevens is still astonished at his involvement in the metamorphosis.

"I had heard talk about these Hollywood guys putting a film about Seabiscuit together. And I was sceptical because they have never portrayed our sport in a good light in previous films. I just thought they were going to embarrass us."

What Stevens hadn't heard was that Gary Ross, the film's writer and director, was obsessed with the fact that he should play the role of George "the Iceman" Woolf, the iconoclastic jockey who was the prince of the race scene during the 1930s. Their first encounter occurred when Ross burst into the Santa Anita weigh-in room with a flourish of Hollywood chutzpah and declared that Stevens was born not so much to race as to portray Woolf on the silver screen.

The Iceman Cometh, as it were.

"And I gotta confess, I kinda told him to fuck off," sighs Stevens now. "I was thinking, 'what, you want me to be some kind of friggin' extra?' I was racing seven horses that day and I had already had four seconds. So I just said, 'listen pal, you don't have the money and I don't have the time'."

But Ross persisted and charmed and convinced and over time, Stevens caught the note of fervour in their voices and found their dynamism for the game he loved had attracted him. Next thing he knew, Tobey Maguire was showing him the reins.

"This film has all quietly surprised us. I mean, first of all getting it made because racing is struggling in America right now. And somehow this big producer comes on board and there is a big budget behind it and you have guys like Tobey Maguire and Jeff Bridges and Chris Cooper, these stunning actors. But on top of that you have some f*** of a jockey that nobody knows and that has never acted before for a part that Gary Ross refuses to even audition for. It was a risk, man."

The film has been generally lauded in the States and Stevens's quiet, constant presence was one of the qualities that distinguished it. This was no mere cameo by a cult celebrity there to lend the film some authenticity for discerning race-goers. This was a novice holding his own among masters on particularly high form.

Several turns in Seabiscuit are destined to light the Oscar nominations like beacons; Jeff Bridges at his most winsome as Charles Howard, the egalitarian and heart-broken owner of Seabiscuit, and William Macy as a glorious huckster and radio man who adorns his broadcast scoops with sound effects and train whistles.

Among these heavyweights, the 5ft 4in Stevens treads and the highest compliment that can be paid him is he blends in. Faces are the key.

More than anything, Seabiscuit is a film that celebrates the face, both equine and human. With Randy Newman's moving orchestral score, Seabiscuit recaptures the Depression and subsequent dustbowl years in America with lingering stills from the black and white photography of Walker Evans. Ravaged, pale-eyed and dungaree-clad children of the 1930s, hungry and yet hopeful in the heartland. And all of the actors in the film have wonderful faces, from the sleepy-eyed, battered Maguire to Cooper, whose features carry a magnetic truthfulness and a quiet sadness that balance the more exuberant passages of Seabiscuit.

Stevens has a face that fits well in this company, with Native American cheekbones, deeply tanned skin and blazing eyes that constantly move.

"It's because I am a mutt," he laughs.

Born and raised on a horse farm in Idaho, he is part Irish, part German, part Iroquois Indian. Native American horse lore informed his early attitude to the animals and without invitation, he peels away his shirt in the foyer at Goffs to reveal an elaborate tattoo of Sitting Bull on his left shoulder blade.

Stevens wanted nothing to do with horses until he was nine years old and his father sat him on a racehorse for a canter "and I just felt the unbelievable f****ing power of being in control of this beast. That was it. I was done. I loved the adrenaline, the buzz. It was my life."

He became the George Woolf of 1990s America, winning three Belmont Stakes and three Breeders' Cups and becoming one of the top earners of the race game. His winners have combined earnings of over $200 million.

So he has lived fast and raced hard, met divorces, hit the dirt of the track at speed, shaken himself, retired with a busted knee in 1999 only to be lured back in and now, aged 40, he finds himself with a film career. It is a story worth a whiskey on an October night in Ireland.

"There is a scene in the film where I find Tobey's character, Red Pollard, beaten up and lying on the ground and I try to pick him up," he explains.

"And Gary Ross must have taken 10, 15 shots just of Tobey. And the thing was he got to know me so well over the months that he could just draw on things from my own life to set me off. Like, right that night, shooting that scene, I was reminded of one of my best friends, Chris, a champion jockey in America, who had a drug problem for like 15 years and I couldn't help him.

"And Gary just nods at Tobey and said to me, 'it's like Chris, you can't help'. And that was it. Tobey just gives me a shove and walks away and I'm standing there, I can't help the prick and whatever emotion you see was brought out by Gary Ross. I don't even know if it's acting, it's what he made me feel."

Relatively early on in filming, the cast had a sense that the alchemy between them was unusually strong. Seabiscuit is about a collection of oddballs destined for greatness: "My jockey is too tall, my horse is too small, my trainer is too old and I'm too dumb to know the difference," eulogises Bridges from the back of a train. Seabiscuit was deemed by the race gods of the day to be "an incorrigible horse", small but with a ravenous appetite and a penchant for sleeping and a cranky temperament.

Luck or destiny or whatever brought the horse and the irascible and undeniably lanky Red Pollard and Howard and trainer Tom Smith together. Stevens's character, George Woolf, hovers in Pollard's background, sort of his guardian angel in the cut-throat racing life, wise and unassuming. But what makes the film is that it pauses for humour in the best tradition of the American epics like Star Wars or E.T.

Walking through the sumptuous stables at Pimlico, Maguire's Red Pollard shakes his head in wonder and says "Wow, I wish I was a horse." Cooper takes a withering look at his perennially hungry rider and replies, "well, you're almost big enough."

In all, it is such a handsome film that it was bound to thrive but the extent to which it has taken America by storm, with the promise of further success across the world, has stunned its makers.

"Ya know, we are staying up in Bono's hotel in Dublin," says Stevens. "And I would love to meet the f***er. He doesn't know I exist but I would love to meet him because the older I get, the more political I get.

"My oldest daughter Ashleigh is 20 and her fiance just returned from Iraq and he is really f***ed up by that experience. The whole of America is just wondering what the shit is going on right now. Nobody knows what the future holds and that sense of being in dire straits has not gripped the country since the Wall Street Crash. People are scared. And this film, there are no computers, it is a simple story and you walk out - and I was as sceptical about it as anyone - with a warm feeling. And I think people just need that right now."

Using David McCullough as a narrator, the film reinforces the interpretation of the American past that Ken Burns mastered in documentary series like The Civil War and Baseball. At times, it veers into Walton country but mostly avoids the schmaltz while promoting Emersonian values. At the heart of its narrative is almost an accusatory message for Americans: this was your country once.

It certainly appeals to Stevens's own constituency in Idaho. The very first Seabiscuit premiere took place in the Eygptian Theatre in Boise. The last movie Stevens saw there was The Jungle Book. He was seven years old. Built in 1902, the theatre fell into disrepair and was bound for demolition until it was designated a listed building. Seabiscuit sold out, Stevens was the hometown kid made good.

"It was my first time back in six years. All the guys I grew up with are there. My oldest son, Torry Chad, is named after my two best friends. Nothing changed. Like this experience, it hasn't changed me. In racing, the stable boys are the same as the Queen of England or the Aga Khan and I have ridden winners for both.

"They get the same respect. It was the same on the set of Seabiscuit. The catering guys were the same as Jeff Bridges. Because if there is one weak link, then the whole thing crashes. And I think the race scenes highlight that, how reliant jockeys are on one another's skill and at the same time how beautiful the rhythm is between the animal and the jockey."

And the race scenes are terrific. All that is missing is the smell of horse and leather and the feel of the dirt. It was recreation of those epic race meets at Pimlico and Santa Anita that won over Stevens's own moral voices, the leather-skinned track characters and actual sons of the Depression with an inherited suspicion and disdain of anything Hollywood. Impatient men that would have taken a dim view of a Hall of Famer like Stevens flirting with the celluloid world. Yet even they left premieres, with Stevens, a tiny bit misty-eyed.

"That was my biggest fear, that my peers wouldn't take to it. And these guys were adamant that it wouldn't work. And they fell for it. I mean, there is a bit of Hollywood it it, yeah. But it is realistic."

And that is the final grace note of Seabiscuit. It all actually happened. So although the unapologetic pining for a more rustic and noble time leaves it on the coconut shy for the cynical, its pure and unpretentious enthusiasm for the subject just dwarfs all cynical perspective.

Seabiscuit is set to join the rare list of sports-theme films that enrich and transcend its sport. It could also become a general classic.

"Yeah, I think so," says Stevens. "I think it will take on that epic quality over time."

It all leaves Gary Stevens in a curious position. In the race world, it is probably all seen as karma, with a current hero riding high on the myth of a long dead horse.

Stevens's performance in the film could lead to a change in career but he is not so sure. A film star once and the racing world might let him away with it. If he makes a habit of it, though, they may have to show him the whip."

"I dunno. It's been the best experience of my life. But I gotta get racing again."