James Purefoy can be a terrific brute.

So far, in Rome, HBO's brilliant and breathtakingly violent soap-opera-in-sandals, in which he stars as Mark Antony, Purefoy has his way with a shepherdess while his army and her flock look on, offers to chop off Cicero's hands, clubs a man to death on the Senate floor, cleans the clock of his nemesis, Octavian, and later wages war on him, trailing 8,000 dead bodies in his path.

"And a 45-person, 4-day orgy," Purefoy notes, grinning his slightly crooked grin as he drinks espressos and smokes a couple of cigarettes out on the sidewalk of the West Hollywood hipster hangout Swingers one afternoon recently. "Really good fun."

A veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Purefoy, 42, grew up in Somerset and lives in London, where his pastimes include knocking about the woodshop ("I used to do a lot of sculpture. Heads and hands. Chipping away at bits of wood") and various back roads in his rickety 1972 Citro�n DS ("I have mellow cars. Top speed: 65 miles per hour"). There's the requisite handsome-actor reputation as a ladies' man (he's been linked to Gwyneth Paltrow and Piper Perabo), but there's also the 10-year-old son he adores back in England, a steady girlfriend (whose name he won't give up), and the apparent inability to dish about former costars, except to give them lovely compliments. ("Reese—she's a lay-dee," he says more than once of his Vanity Fair costar.) And despite the number of baddies he's portrayed (Blackbeard, Beau Brummell, and, of course, Mark Antony), he's entirely capable of seeming an absolute pussycat.

He's in touch, for instance, with his emotions. Purefoy just spent two and a half years shooting the $8-million-an-episode series at the historic Cinecitt� studios outside Rome, and he still wells up when recalling the fettuccine Alfredo at Alfredo alla Scrofa's ("It is like a spiritual experience"). And the little lid that keeps the espresso warm in the cups at a certain caf� there ("I find that a most thoughtful idea"). Wet eyes again at the memory of his costar Ciar�n Hinds's haunting death scene as Julius Caesar last season. And don't even mention Johnny Cash's cover of the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt" to him.