I am not used to seeing James Purefoy with his clothes on. Neither, I suspect, are you. If you were one of the six million people who tuned into BBC2's Rome, you will recall, if not his name, then most definitely the rest of him. Let's cut to the chase: he's the one who did a full-frontal while playing Mark Antony, Julius Caesar's soldier sidekick, in the £58m Sunday evening sex and sandals drama.
Most recently he appeared as the swashbuckling pirate Blackbeard (another BBC drama, this time a two-parter). Purefoy has the grace to know he was born with a rather good deck of cards. He is handsome without being too threatening, charming without being sleazy. If anything, he is apologetic about not having lived a hard enough life.
He has been a jobbing actor for nearly 20 years, and while, by his own admission, he is seldom out of work ("Resting? I wish that were the case, the whole resting thing, that doesn't really happen," he says, when I ask him if he's ever had any lean times), neither is he as well known as perhaps he should be. Purefoy has always bubbled just underneath the public consciousness. His fame is of the kind that makes people do a double take at the bar because they think they know him, rather than scream at the checkout because they own him - and he likes it that way. "Oh, Jesus, I don't want that life. I really do want to just be able to sit in the corner of the pub with my friends... to just be an actor and still go to the supermarket and not get bothered," he says.
The second series of Rome starts in March. In the meantime, Purefoy has swapped the toga for a suit and the sword for a mobile phone, and is spending much of his time in LA filming an American version of Manchild, the BBC's fortysomething sitcom about a bunch of blokes.
The British version of Manchild "starred" Anthony Head, Nigel Havers, Don Warrington and Ray Burdis, but starred isn't really the right word as it was considered something of a flop ("like their libidos" commented the Mail On Sunday). Still, the makers clearly hope that recasting and relocating the series in LA will turn the show into a male version of producer Darren Starr's former success story, Sex And The City.
Purefoy plays the British lead in an otherwise all-American ensemble. His character is billed as a nightclub owner who, rather dubiously, "only sleeps with under-25 year olds", alongside John Corbett (Aidan from Sex And The City), Paul Hipp (the cute but troubled Detective Chris Pappas in Without A Trace) and Kevin Smith (the chubby, hairy one from Clerks).
Manchild is something of a departure for Purefoy, who has carved out a niche playing dashing not-quite-to-be-trusted men in costume dramas. His other credits include the Regency dandy Beau Brummell, and two movie versions of classic novels: Rawdon Crawley in Vanity Fair (opposite Reese Witherspoon's Becky Sharp) and Tom Bertram in Mansfield Park. If he had a bosom he'd spend most of his time heaving it. "I'm about to do something modern, in a suit, with mobile phones and cars, which is so thrilling, I won't know what to do with myself," says Purefoy of his role in Manchild.
Exactly what is it about him that says costume drama? "Jesus Christ, I have no idea," he says, shrugging his shoulders and scratching his appropriately square jaw.
In the flesh Purefoy is slighter than he looks on the box, and his face looks a little more lived-in, but he's still pretty for his 42 years. I suspect he enjoys the suggestion of gravitas that stubble gives him, a bit like those boys in college who still had trouble getting served in the pub when they were 21.
Does he worry about typecasting? "If you find yourself always playing the villain, or if you find yourself being typecast into a corner where you're not happy then that's probably rather miserable, but if I have been typecast I am quite happy about it. I'm trying to work out what I have been typecast as. I don't know - what do you think it is?"
He seems to do a lot of historical stuff, either swashbuckling or swaggering. "I think I'm a bit immature; I find it really exciting, still, to do those things. How much fun is it leading a cavalry charge of 200 Romans on horseback, you know, at the Battle of Philippi? That's great fun to do, that's not a nine-to-five job, and if you can marry that with psychological complexity...
"The more I read about [Mark Antony], the more I looked into him in history, he's just unbelievably tragic - what happened to him in the end - and certainly the way we've played it, which is, I think, going to be very different from how anybody else has ever... Those scenes, especially him and Cleopatra at the end, there's clearly something very tragic about it. It's really interesting just getting your head around a man of that size and what he's reduced to, and how he can deal with her betrayal of him... And, you know, a great Roman general who sincerely believed he was a sun god. Get your head round that one," says Purefoy.
I expect Purefoy to be a little bit embarrassed about all the costume dramas, the togas, the flouncy language, the ridiculousness of it all, but he's having none of it. Instead of being defensive he readily admits all that dressing up is a little bit silly, but so what as long as he's loving it?
When he talks about his work, Purefoy does that actorly thing of referring to his characters as if they are real. But try as I might to rile him, provoke him to a little venom, he refuses to play ball. It's hard to know whether he's trying to charm me or he really is that good-natured.
Even when I ask him why he always seems to be getting his kit off, he just laughs and answers: "Ah, nudity. That's quite a recent thing, the nudity. It's an early autumn of my career."
Does he get embarrassed by it? "I think the older I get, the less I should be doing," he says, with a slightly wistful sigh. He says that, far from being gratuitous, Mark Antony's nudity was "an ideal opportunity to show somebody who, even though he was butt naked, was outrageously confident and strong and had no qualms about it, and it said an enormous amount about the psyche of that man."
Maybe - but it must have made him blush a little? "The first job I ever did was Equus on stage, as the boy, and I was 17, and we opened the show with me naked in the spotlight being examined by doctors. That was my entrance to the stage, so anything after that was easy. Also, for some reason, nudity was never shameful, it was never brought up in my household when I was a kid, there was no 'dirty, dirty sex'. It's not like we all ran around naked in some horrid 70s nightmare, it just was never an issue, and because it was never an issue I've never been embarrassed, I guess," he says, graciously.
By his own admission, Purefoy had a "very bucolic" upbringing. He grew up in the countryside, in a small village just outside Yeovil in Somerset. He boarded at Sherborne public school from the age of seven until 16. Sherborne was very "Victorian in its outlook", says Purefoy - perhaps that is where he picked up his impeccable manners. He describes his parents (who separated when he was a nipper) as "upper-middle class, I guess, if I was forced", though he winces visibly as he says these words.
Purefoy did spectacularly badly at Sherborne, leaving with one very expensive O-level, so he went on to night school and got 11 more - "you know, eight As and three Bs, obviously I'm not thick, just crap teachers," he says. After that he went to live with his father in Surrey, where he did his A-levels and encountered a drama teacher who proved very influential. "He showed me a lot of stuff that I still carry with me today; he was my big inspiration," says Purefoy.
It was around this time that he also became politicised. "I sold the Socialist Worker outside Brixton tube," he laughs. How many papers did he sell per Saturday? "I was crap, absolutely useless. I'm not sure how many any of us sold - nobody seemed to be terribly interested in buying them - but I did spend a lot of that period outside the South African embassy or on CND marches or against the poll tax or all those sorts of things," he says.
The radical stuff ended when he went to the RSC in Stratford - well it would, wouldn't it? These days he's a card-carrying member of the Labour party, although this, too, seems to pain him. "You put a cross against people who most reflect your views and that's still the Labour party, regardless of Iraq..." he says. "Iraq, that's a big fuck up, isn't it?" Did he go on any marches? "No. I believed there were weapons, I believed they were there, I did. [Blair] is a very trustworthy-looking person," he says.
Purefoy, who has a son with the actress Holly Aird (they split four years ago), claims not to have any Hollywood hankerings. His name was bandied about for James Bond, pre-Daniel Craig and his blue swimming trunks, but since Craig is signed up for the next five years, that probably puts him out of the frame. "I do live a weirdly divided life, because I'm not a Hollywood superstar, I don't live on Malibu Beach, I don't do massive OK! spreads, I don't go to premieres and parties that much. Every now and then I do, but when I come home I have my boy and it really is about taking his gym stuff to school and helping with his homework and all the banal things that are the cornerstone of bringing up a child," he says. Rome was perfect because he could leave the set (it's filmed in the Cinecittà studios in Rome where Ben-Hur was made) at half past three and be back in time to read his son a bedtime story. If Manchild does well, of course, all that could change. "Just doing the series was a really big decision because if it gets picked up, I'll have to be there for three months of the year, and even three months of the year is a lot for me to do because it's a long way away," he says.
That's still in the lap of the gods. Back in Rome, Purefoy describes Mark Antony as the ultimate alpha male. "I'm not shy about him, and he's not shy, and he will say what comes to mind if he wants to. There's nobody who's around who's going to stop him, no kind of press to say you're politically incorrect, or how dare you behave in this way. He doesn't give a fuck. It's very liberating playing someone like that. I just say what's in the script."
Even without Purefoy going full-frontal, the second series of Rome is quite raunchy for a Sunday evening. "Is it?" he asks. Yes, I tell him, but then I'm quite a prude. "That's interesting, who was getting shagged in the first episode?" Well, mostly you, I say. There is one scene between Mark Antony and Atia of the Julii (Caesar's niece, Antony's lover, played by Polly Walker) towards the end of the first episode that I can't quite get out of my head. "Oh, I know what you're taking about - all, 'I'm not getting out of bed until I've been fucked'; 'I've never fucked a woman in a funeral dress before'," says Purefoy, with characteristic aplomb and, I suspect, enjoying my blushes. Doesn't he find it hard to say such lines without either cringing or bursting out laughing? "You don't have time to do too many takes, not on television like this," says Purefoy, and besides, there is no point playing someone like Antony and doing it half-heartedly: "You can't apologise for it, can you? That's what it is in the script, that's what it is, you can't sort of mutter it into the pillow and pretend it's not happening. The only way to do it is to absolutely do it, straight down the line, and let the audience make of it what they will and if they go 'oh my God' - like you, a bit prudish - that's probably rather good for you, make you blush a little bit, you know."
Rome pulled in more than six million viewers, not bad for BBC2, and yet it got somewhat of a panning from the critics who, one suspects, expected something a tad more cerebral. Even Purefoy admits to being a little snobbish about what was clearly a soap opera, albeit one with the largest standing film set in the world (the backdrop cost a whopping $35m to build).
"When we started doing publicity early on in the last series, we fought billing it as a soap, but actually it is a soap; it's sex in the sandals, it's like Roman Dynasty. Then, once you get your head around that as an actor, you kind of play into it a lot more, you relax into it, it's fine, that's what it is. The Sopranos is a soap, there are good soaps and there are bad soaps, and just because it's a soap, don't be bitchy and snobby about the genre, make the best soap you can. And that's what I think it is, and now everybody realises they are in a Roman soap, it's kind of a lot easier to do - and you're not quite so precious about it," says Purefoy.
