When Colin Firth walks into the room, he looks like a happy man.
Of course, he has every reason to be. After dedicating 30 years of his life to this acting lark, the 49-year old is currently enjoying perhaps the best reviews of his career.
The main reason is A Single Man, a dark drama directed by Tom Ford (the fashion designer, marking his film debut) in which Firth plays George, an English professor dazily going through what he plans on being his last day in Los Angeles. Having lost his longtime partner, Jim, eight months earlier, George is ready to end it all.
Looking at the man sitting across from me, I suddenly realise what polar opposites mean. Colin Firth looks positively fresh.
"Well..," he drolls, "I haven't been fresh for several years."
Having already picked up five major awards for his performance in A Single Man, as well as Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations, Firth's chances of some Oscar recognition this year look stronger than ever. Not that the man himself wants to jinx such a possibility. It would be his first ever nod from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
Firth would rather talk instead about what he likes to call his recent run of good luck, his caddish Lord Henry making last year's Dorian Gray almost worth watching, but, truth be told, not even he could save Robert Zemeckis' dead-eyed motion capture epic, A Christmas Carol.
"Choices are limited," he says, "whatever is happening for you. You pick off the menu of what's offered to you. Some people are more pro-active than others, and try to make things happen, and produce their own stuff, and write stuff. Acting's my day job; I've got a lot else going on in my life apart from just acting. Stuff that takes up a lot of energy. I don't feel like I want to aggressively mould my acting career. I've been doing it too long; it's exciting when it is exciting, and freakin' tedious when it isn't. And just occasionally, I've been lucky enough to have some stuff come up that's really invigorated me."
So, this isn't some newfound determination? Some midlife crisis?
"My mid-life crisis has been going on for about twenty years," he smiles. "And it doesn't show any sign of ending soon. I narrowly escaped the motorcycle and sports car, just out of the fear of death and looking too much of a dick. I've done things that would be more privately humiliating, such as buying an electric guitar, but no one has to hear that. So, I just think roles get a little juicier; well, they have for me, at my age.
"Basically, you're always going to be cast partly according to what you physically look like, what your voice is like - let's leave what other people would call ability out of it. Just in terms of the stuff that you bring, there's baggage. Your own baggage; whether you're fat or thin, tall or short, have hair or don't have hair, and all the rest of it. That will play a part in why people want to cast you. And then there's age. I remember being twenty-five, and being very, very aware of how bland I looked, and looking at older actors, and just longing for a wrinkle. Just to have something in the toolbox, to express anything.
"I don't like to be a demonstrative actor anyway, but if an undemonstrative person has nothing really written on their face, there's really not much going on. But I always admired subtlety, and I always admired what was going on behind people's eyes, when I watched other actors. And I don't relish the idea of deterioration, but, I think playing people who have a past, and have a more complex agenda than might apply to a twenty-year old, has been a welcome thing for me. I don't know how long that goes on - maybe it's a little window for me, a margin or something. But, when I was in my twenties, we tended to be disappointed lovers, which is a little bit banal."
For many, Colin Firth will always be their perfect romantic lead, their own little secret Mr. Darcy, come to carry his beloved Elizabeth, or Bridget, or insert-your-name-here, away from this dreary, everyday life. These same individuals believe Firth was born to play the lead in Jane Austin's Pride And Prejudice, so, lucky for them, he did. In 1995.
"Well, I was thirty-five by then, and already, I thought I was growing out of the age where I would ever get cast in romantic stuff. But he's actually a character role. He's a pretty screwed-up, complicated person. He's not just a sighing young callow youth. He's not Romeo. Or Ferdinand in The Tempest."
Perhaps that's what makes him so attractive?
"Maybe. The point is, he's actually a surly, social dysfunctional. And that was interesting for me to play as an actor. Much more interesting than anything I would have been given at twenty-one. Then as it goes on, you talk about A Single Man or Dorian Gray - those guys are older. Lord Henry is, for whatever reason, someone who likes to take a pure, unbroken young boy and mess with him, for fun. And actually destroy him, for fun. And do these horrendous things, vicariously, and then go home and wash his hands of it. He's a pretty despicable guy. To get into someone who's as, you know, unbalanced, if you like - as dark and disturbed as that - is fun.
"And, you know, with A Single Man, that's something different. This is a man with a past, and now I have one. I'm going to be 50 before long, and this is about... There was so much texture to what was on the page. That guy goes through so much in one day - he has despair and heartbreak, his whole past, which he's missing, and things he's lost, but then he goes on to hilarity, and lust. They don't give that in roles to people who are twenty-five. Well, not to people who look like me, at twenty-five."
So, why take on something as big and cumbersome and, ultimately, heartless as Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol? One for the boys, Luca and Matteo?
"Yes and no, actually. I didn't do it for that reason. I'd done family films because of my own children in the past, and I realised that that's maybe not a reason to do them. Because suddenly you bring them and their friends into the world of a daddy who does movies. My young children are six and eight, and I think that a film like A Christmas Carol probably does play to just about any age. Which is why I signed on."
In an episode of the very fine American sitcom 30 Rock, the main character, Liz Lemon, has an adoption agency calling around to check her out, and she decides to hide all her Colin Firth movies, in case "they class it as erotica". Firth has always dismissed his sex symbol role (as has his wife, Livia), but there must be a part of him that's chuffed as hell when it's mentioned...
"Oh, God," he laughs, "I'm trying to drag it out as long as I can. It's definitely a thing to enjoy, for as long as it lasts."
Does he not recognise the effect Colin Firth might have on women when he walks into a room?
"No. It's all happening somewhere else; I never seem to meet the people who feel this way."
For the first time today, Firth looks almost sad.
"So, no, I would be thrilled to have it for life," he finishes, "if it were true."
Words - Paul Byrne
A Single Man hits Irish cinemas Feb 12th