Where do we stand on Pierce Brosnan? Opinion, well, the little of it I canvassed before meeting him, seems divided. Men are unexpectedly harsh. He’s too smug, they say. Too knowing of his good looks. Clearly spends a couple of hours a day working on his hair. Women are kinder, their theme being not just that Brosnan is good-looking but that he has been a good father to his five children (two adopted) as well as a good husband to both his wives (his first having died of cancer). That’s three goods.

My impression of him, when we meet in Soho, is that he does not seem particularly comfortable in his skin. Though he has a crusher handshake, there is a primness to him, a preciousness. He is immaculately groomed in black suit, black shirt and black scarf flicked over his shoulder, just so. His hair is (suspiciously) black too, as well as neatly cut and blow-dried, and all this blackness makes the vivid blueness of his eyes the more startling.

He’s had his teeth fixed, which may be a sign of vanity. Then again, if you look out for him in his full screen debut – he plays ‘first Irishman’ in The Long Good Friday – you’ll see he had teeth like Victorian gravestones, so this seems fair enough. Unless he has had his face fixed as well, which he claims he hasn’t: he has indecently smooth and young-looking skin. Perhaps it’s the L’Oréal moisturiser. There is an ad campaign running at the moment showing his face next to a pot of the stuff.

He may not look his age, but does he feel it? ‘No, it’s good Irish genes,’ he says. ‘I don’t feel 54, but I do see the age creeping in. You do change little by little.’ He saw his Spotlight photograph the other day, the one that appeared in the official casting directory when he first started acting in 1975, after training at the London Drama Centre.

‘This young kid in the production office said, “F— me, is that you?” So he thought I’d changed. Perhaps it’s a matter of perception. I don’t think my mother looks her age. She has a sharp disposition in her 76th year. And the old man that I never knew had a spry, chiselled look to him. Snow-white hair. Flinty, squinty eyes. I look a bit like him.’

Thomas Brosnan was an alcoholic who earned a living as a carpenter in County Meath and who abandoned his family when Pierce was two. The young Brosnan’s mother left Ireland for London to train as a nurse, leaving her son to be brought up by her parents. He followed her over when he was 11, only to be picked on at school for being Irish. He fought back and soon learnt to conceal his Irishness. He has described his childhood as full of ‘loneliness’.

As an adult he has been compared to an expensively elegant yet tightly furled umbrella, and that’s about right. But the unease you notice is also partly to do with the way he talks himself up, partly with his convoluted, overly wrought speech patterns – they are almost stream-of-consciousness at times, with him asking and answering his own questions. It is also to do with his mid-Atlantic voice. It seems self-consciously smooth, whispery and polished, tortured almost, as if he is still a teenage boy trying on various voices to see which one seems the most impressive, rather as schoolchildren try out different signatures before settling on one. There’s an obvious explanation for this: an identity crisis. He’s an Irishman who has taken American citizenship, but has made his name playing a well-spoken Englishman. ‘It’s only confusing if I let it be,’ he says. ‘Intrinsically, I’m the same person I was as a young lad and I think I still have the optimism of life, still the same wants and desires to be good and great about what I do. I have asked myself that question. When I went to America I spoke so much about who I was and gave so much away in a confessional, Irish, story-telling way that I suddenly realised I had given up a lot of myself. I had to shut up.’

Did his 11-year-old self have a strong Irish accent? ‘Yes, and a strong sense of his Irish identity. Very Irish. Nineteen sixty-four; Putney Comprehensive School. Made to feel different, and no child wants that, so the performance began. The seeds of acting. Before that, I was in Ireland and the first theatrical performance was being an altar boy at church. The whole celebration of the Catholic Mass. I was enjoying being up there and looked at. I still go to church. Went last night.’

The impression he gives of being uncomfortable with himself may also be to do with his having had his identity stolen by James Bond. These days he seems to want to play it down. The biography on his website even begins: ‘Perhaps best known worldwide as James Bond…’ Perhaps?

There is no perhaps about it. The four Bond films Brosnan made were huge box office hits, the first three generating a billion dollars in revenue, the last one, Die Another Day in 2002, making half a billion on its own. Before him it had been generally assumed that the Bond franchise had run out of steam, with Roger Moore turning Bond into a cartoon figure and Timothy Dalton putting the final nails in the coffin with his politically correct version. For the purists, Brosnan represented a return to the hairy, misogynistic and cruel Sean Connery glory days. He also made it possible for Daniel Craig to introduce his darker, grittier version of Bond… and this is a sore point. Brosnan had wanted to take Bond down that route himself, with two more films.

‘Connery did six,’ he said after making Die Another Day. ‘Six would be a number, then never come back.’ But in July 2004 he announced that ‘Bond is another lifetime, behind me’, which may have been a negotiating ploy with the studio. If it was, it didn’t work because in October 2004, when his agent rang to say negotiations had stopped, Brosnan said, ‘I was shocked. It was a bit of a body blow. They had invited me back and then uninvited me.’

Let’s face it, this bitterness about Bond, if bitterness it is, gives an interesting texture to Brosnan’s moisturised façade. I want to explore it further but he only wants to talk about his new film, Mamma Mia! And he keeps dragging the conversation back to it. He keeps telling me, indeed, how good it is and how pleased he is with his performance in it.

The story revolves around a young girl who is about to get married and decides to track down the father she never knew. Brosnan plays – and sings – one of her possible fathers, and Meryl Streep plays her mother.

Given the sempiternal popularity of ABBA, and of the stage version which 30 million people have seen worldwide, Mamma Mia! the movie looks certain to be one of the biggest block-busters of the summer. We shall come to it, I assure him. For now I want to know more about his confused identity, especially what it is like having his identity swallowed up by James Bond – having, for example, people in the street shout out, ‘Look, it’s James Bond!’ rather than, ‘Look, it’s Pierce Brosnan.’ He purses his lips. Breathes through his nose. ‘I have very little to say on the matter,’ he says. ‘I promised myself before I started on Mamma Mia! not to discuss Bond because all has been said from me. All is done. That is it.’

But isn’t that a little perverse? Bond is, after all, a huge part of his life, his identity, his career. He even has a Bond museum of sorts at his home (the watches, tuxedos and cars he was allowed to keep). And when, one day, the Brosnan obituaries are written, James Bond will surely be in the opening paragraph. ‘It will be there, front row and centre, just as it will be for Sean and Roger or any man thereafter. I think Daniel is in the first blush of what it all means. You become an ambassador to a small country. Bond is an industry. You make your pact with the devil. You know that it will follow you. But you just hope you get yourself off the ropes. I have no bitterness but I just feel exhausted by it.’

The no-bitterness line doesn’t quite ring true. But perhaps it is more disappointment at the way his tenure as Bond ended. Either way, he now says more firmly: ‘Let’s talk about Mamma Mia!’ Hmm. I suppose GoldenEye, his first Bond movie in 1995, was the opposite of the almost guaranteed hit that is Mamma Mia! He takes the bait. ‘It was daunting. Having left the press conference for GoldenEye I did go back to my small hotel room and say, “What have I done? What have I done? What have I said yes to?” Dear God, give me strength. And it’s such an institution. You can’t get it right. You’re just not going to get it right.’

Yet he took on the role at the right time. Had he been able to take it when he was first offered it in 1986 – his contract on the television series Remington Steele prevented him – he could have ended up the Timothy Dalton of the Bond story. He was devastated at the time – ‘I felt a kind of ugly numbness when it all fell apart,’ he has said. ‘It was a very painful experience.’ But as things turned out, Dalton was given the part as a second choice after Brosnan and Timothy Dalton became the Timothy Dalton of the Bond story. But the subject of Bond is making him hot. ‘Oh God, I’ve got to take my scarf off now,’ he says unwrapping the garment. ‘Look. Bond was there. It was great. It has allowed me to make movies like The Matador [a dark comedy in which Brosnan played a deranged hitman]. To have a working career. It also allowed me to make Mamma Mia! Let’s get back to that.’

OK, OK. Was he nervous about the singing? ‘All trained actors have to learn to sing just as they have to learn to do tap and fencing. I had actually made a film before, called Evelyn, in which I sang, but singing pub songs in Dublin is different from the musical acrobatics and precision of a pop song. I was mildly terrified about singing the songs in Mamma Mia! but the musical director, Martin, left me with an iPod full of tunes and I spent the next few weeks in my house in Hawaii singing into the ocean. Driving my sons crazy as I drove them to school in the morning.’

He wasn’t an ABBA fan before this film. ‘No, I wasn’t. Did I dance to them? Hear them? Live with them? Yes, we all did, but it wasn’t my kind of music. I would never have gone to see this musical if I hadn’t been offered the job.’

Does he dislike the musical genre? ‘It’s not high on my list. I thought Moulin Rouge was inspirational, and Jesus Christ Superstar I loved.’ So the romance of musicals is lost on him? ‘I have a romantic side, of course, and a sentimental side. If it’s good and meaningful and coherent, I will have tears. It’s the most wonderful thing to be moved by a performance. Edith Piaf. The life of an actor lends itself to emotion and yet you have to be tough as old boots to stay at the table.’

We are on the subject of emotions. When Cassandra Harris, his first wife, died in 1991, four years after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, he said he was in ‘a helpless state of confusion and anger’. The grief would strike unexpectedly. He would be driving along the Harbor Freeway in California and find himself screaming at the top of his lungs: ‘Why? Why?’ I ask if he has ever drawn upon his memory of those extreme emotions in his acting and, if he has, whether that made him feel compromised, whether he felt it had devalued the real emotion. He gives a long sigh.

‘Well, I’ve never had to reproduce that particular emotion. I’ve never been in a piece where I have to lose a wife. I’m in a piece now where I have to lose a son. A movie with Susan Sarandon. I hold myself in abeyance about it somewhat. I will have to find that emotion… but you do use it. You do. It’s not as pure as the original emotion and there is that sense of fraudulence and of scavenging in your heart for that emotion, but if it is well written, you get an echo anyway and a subtext of what happened in your own life. What happened in my life back there has its own private place. With other emotions, well, you know the experience of pain, laughter and deep frustration because we all act everyday, to our wives, our children.’

He sometimes catches himself using his skills as an actor to manipulate other people’s emotions in his everyday life. ‘Of course. I could be doing it now, but so could you be. I have been subjected to many a lovely interview only to read in print that they have cut me to ribbons. I was being sincere but because they didn’t like what I did as an actor, or the way I spoke, they had made their mind up before I walked in the door.’

Oh dear. Perhaps I’m a little guilty here. Certainly I am finding him more sympathetic now that he is opening up a bit. And I can see why he might find it frustrating to live in the shadow of James Bond. For a proud man he doesn’t seem especially proud of himself for doing those films.

Tellingly, he once said of Christopher Fettes, an actor and one of his oldest friends, ‘I don’t know what he thinks of my doing Bond – I’ve always been scared to ask. Maybe he’ll say, “Could do better”, or “Try harder” – or “What are you doing?”‘ (Actually what Fettes said was, ‘To be honest, I think James Bond is a bit below his talents.’) Besides, there is more to Brosnan’s career than acting. He is a canny businessman who has his own production company, one that has made six films, his biggest being the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) in which he starred. ‘Thomas Crown was very good at playing on an iconic theme,’ he says. ‘There was room for manoeuvre with it, in terms of “suit acting”, which Steve [McQueen] never did very well. He was never comfortable with. I thought there was a chink in the armour there. We’re going to be doing another Thomas Crown. How do we find him again? How do we make a surprise? Good sex scenes. It’s great when you get it right, but very fleeting.’

He’s been a Hollywood star, and indeed a Hollywood mogul, for quite a few years now; what motivates him to keep at it? Is it the money? Surely he’s made enough to retire. ‘I’ve got a house in Hawaii and another one in California and a few overheads still. I’m building two homes in Malibu. I have a mortgage to pay. I’ve invested. I have my properties and want to keep them. I could cruise along but I like working. I’m getting older. I’m 54. What’s next? Do I want to direct? I love the visuals of it all. I paint. How do I mix that with acting? I like producing. I enjoy having my company. So a musical, why not? Having Meryl singing The Winner Takes it All on a bluff overlooking Greece is wonderful. I’ve worked with some beautiful ladies, Halle Berry and so on, but Meryl is the tops.’

Speaking of Berry, her Bond bikini is on display at the Imperial War Museum at the moment, as part of a Bond exhibition. Is he going to see it – the exhibition, I mean? ‘I have no desire to go to see it. I’ve been asked but I don’t have the heart. As for the bikini, I saw the real thing. I saw it on the day and so did half of Spain. She came out of the water, which was very cold and not clean. You looked to the right and looked to the left and there were huge crowds of people. Everyone had turned up to see that scene.’

I tell him that I had canvassed opinion about him before meeting him and that female colleagues had all seemed to know that he was a good husband and good father. ‘Interesting,’ he says. ‘I found it quite cathartic to talk about my wife after she died. The disease of ovarian cancer is so insidious and frightening, I thought it would be good to explore my own feelings in an interview with People magazine, which I later regretted.

‘That had a huge effect. I was fairly numb and deeply in pain when I gave that interview. I was grieving. It put an enormous focus on me as a father and husband. You don’t want to lose the common touch and get adrift from your life, because fame is glorious but it’s also hollow and meaningless without love and family and mates and bricks and mortar.’

Hollow in what way? ‘If you’re having an off-day it can be a very uncomfortable experience to be recognised in public. You have this other persona following you. Being observed and judged all the time can make you feel neurotic. The way to deal with it is to be nice to everyone, really. I hope I’d be nice without the mantle of fame. I’ve been working down in Soho these past five days and I am now the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine. From Thomas Crown to Thomas the Tank. I go to the pubs around here. Meet mates for lunch. My son [Sean]. He lives here. He’s 24, went to the Central School of Drama here, he’s in the first throes of being an actor, played Romeo with the RSC. I think he’s got the talent and the guts and the humility to be a good actor. He looks like me, actually.’

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? ‘It’s a great thing, for goodness’ sake! Looks like me – and his darling mother, God bless her.’

After his first wife died, was it Sean that forced him to re-engage with the world? ‘The children forced me to carry on, and my life carried on because of the children, no question. We had been together for 17 years, my wife and I, so that was a long partnership and it was very hard for me to find myself again. The main thing was to find a positive place for her in my life. We still talk about her. She’s not forgotten and I am blessed with a wife now [Keely Shaye Smith] who always keeps in her heart a place for my first wife. Keeps it open because she has a stepson and I have stepchildren. It takes a mighty heart to do that. A special kind of woman.’

Oddly enough, when I see his words written down, without hearing him deliver them, I find them more moving. For the record, he believes that he is comfortable in his skin. ‘I’d say so. I can be pretty hard on myself and have a good, healthy dose of insecurity and doubt, though. All the foibles of being human and being an actor and being a husband and being a father, wondering where to go next, wondering how talented I am. Where is that talent? How big is it? How small?’

Having heard that he prefers to be photographed from the left, I ask whether he is a narcissist. ‘There is always someone to cut you down. I have enough people to take the piss out of me and tell me to shut up and go away and don’t be boring, but actually I’m my own worst critic. I’ve tried to use my looks as well as I can but they have also cost me jobs. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.’

I like him for saying that. The interview is winding up, but before I go I ask if he will sign autographs for my James Bond-obsessed sons, aged 10 and eight. Rather endearingly, he signs with a flourish, signatures so big and flowery they take up two whole pages of A4. And when I inspect them later I see he has put in brackets at the bottom of each page (007!!).

To understand the man, Freud believed, you must look to the child – and as a child Rupert Everett was asked to leave his prep school for ‘being difficult’. The reason given for his expulsion from drama school several years later was ‘insubordination’. It would not surprise Freud, then, to learn that interviews with the adult Everett tend to end in tears – the interviewer’s.

And yet I’ve been told by an old friend of the actor that he is ‘funny, sharp and easy-going’. So, I ask Everett as we square up on a sofa in the Grosvenor House Hotel, London, am I going to get Nice Rupert or Nasty Rupert? ‘That,’ he says with an ominous arch of his eyebrow, ‘depends.’

At 42 he still has the brooding features of a teenage delinquent: sulky mouth (lip-glossed), imperious nose and hooded brown eyes (lined with mascara). Even though his T-shirt strains against the muscled contours of his upper body, hardened by hours spent in the gym every day, he still looks gangly. It’s partly to do with his height – he’s a rangy 6ft 4in – partly to do with his legs, which look weedy in tight jeans (he used to wear several pairs of tracksuit bottoms at once to make them look bulkier), partly to do with his large, angular head, as out of proportion as a toddler’s. It’s partly to do, too, with the way he sprawls, his trainers resting on the coffee-table in front of him.

Despite the posture he seems edgy and suspicious, which is only to be expected, given that he finds journalists’ questions ‘unpleasant – like having someone shine a torch in your face’. He didn’t always, though. There was a time when he could be relied upon to say or do something outrageous in his encounters with the press. He would gamely talk about his time as a rent boy (which was how he said he earned his living for a couple of years after his early departure from the Central School of Speech and Drama), or his enthusiastic consumption of heroin, or about the time he had a wobbly and sent a cutting of his pubic hair to a woman who criticised one of his stage performances.

Then, in 1997, he co-starred with Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding, playing her gay friend and confidant. The film made £200 million. It also made Everett a hot property in Hollywood – and he refused to talk any more about his youthful follies. So could it be that the studios decided it was time he toned down the junkie rent boy stuff? Nothing to do with the studios, he says, everything to do with his family who were mortified by the stories and are ‘excruciatingly embarrassed’ by him. A belated attack of conscience, it seems.

Even so, Everett is contractually obliged to promote his films and next month he has a new one out, a romantic comedy called Unconditional Love. In it he plays the secret lover of a popular crooner (Jonathan Pryce) who is a heart-throb to women (especially a Chicago housewife played by Kathy Bates) but who is very much still in the closet. So, let’s start gently. Talk about the latest project. He’s a bit like the character played by Jonathan Pryce in the film, isn’t he? After all, when he first found fame in the mid-1980s, with Another Country and Dance with a Stranger, he became a pin-up to schoolgirls everywhere, as well as to schoolboys who wanted to emulate his dark, scowling, foppish look. ‘What do you mean?’ he says in a lazy, patrician voice.

Well, he is, is he not, in the unusual position of being a sex symbol to both women and men? ‘I see what you’re saying. But I don’t think I’m a sex symbol to men, to be honest. Sex symbols to men are people like David Beckham.’ Perhaps ‘role model’ would be a better term then, in the sense that many heterosexual men wish to emulate his easy way with women, that ability to become the confidant, as he has with his friend Madonna? ‘Be the GBF, you mean? The Gay Best Friend? Well, yes. Lucky me. But I think it’s an old-fashioned view that only gay men are capable of fulfilling that role. I’m sure David Beckham could talk about eye cream and shopping for clothes.’

Everett is the second son of an Army major who later became a stockbroker. While his parents were stationed abroad, he and his brother, Simon (who now runs a fleet of helicopters in Nairobi), lived with their maternal grandmother in Norfolk. He was sent away to board at the age of seven, which he says ‘calcified my heart’. At the same age he watched a film that was to change his life, Mary Poppins. He found, he says, that he identified with Julie Andrews so much that he knew from that moment on that he wanted to be a star.

Was it a parochial childhood? Military? Bourgeois? ‘Um, we weren’t the sort of family who went to St Moritz. We went to Scotland in the summer, stalking. And I had a pekinese, one of my first acts of rebellion. My idea of a holiday was following my family up the hill with my pekinese, who would skip over the heather in front of me. All the other dogs were big and butch.’ He smiles broadly at the memory – it’s a disarming, boyish smile; toothy and mischievous.

Presumably he was a rebel at Ampleforth, the Roman Catholic public school in North Yorkshire he attended? ‘I never wanted to take part in any group activities. I felt really proud of the fact that I never once played rugby in five years. No, that’s not quite true. I was forced to play it twice. I felt good about hiding out in the music school.’ Indeed he did – he’s an accomplished pianist – and in the school’s music and theatre wing, under the stairs, he had a ‘dressing room’ covered in pictures of himself. He would invite friends round to it for imaginary cocktails. Not very Mary Poppins, but certainly starstruck.

He thinks for a moment. ‘I’ve never been any good with authority. I just thought I had all the answers.’ He stands up, walks over to the window, lifts one side of the swagged curtain and peers out across Hyde Park. ‘Authority figures are so irritating,’ he says over his shoulder. ‘Because they always tell you to do things for reasons that aren’t very good. That sums up what authority is about for me.’

Did he have a nickname at school? ‘No.’

Come on, he can tell me. ‘Everett Two. My brother was Everett One.’ Everett Two has written two novels: Hello Darling, Are You Working? (1992) and The Hairdressers of St-Tropez (1995). The reviews weren’t at all kind (‘Deplorable’ – the TLS; ‘Abysmal’ – the Guardian) but the first one, about a boy who wants to wear a wedding dress, and later becomes a hard-up bisexual actor, forced to work in soap operas, had a cracking opening line: ‘By the time he was eight he knew he would never be a Great Actress.’ Was it autobiographical? ‘I don’t want the interview to be about that.’

Oh go on. ‘All right, yes, there was an autobiographical element. As a kid I would be put to bed when my parents had guests and because I was such a show-off I would go to my mum’s room, put on her nightdress and Jackie Onassis shawl, run downstairs, go outside, ring the doorbell and pretend to be one of the guests. I’d say, “Hello, I’m Mrs So and So.” And my parents would say, “Come in.” I would join the other guests for ten minutes, then be sent to bed again, only to reappear ten minutes later at the door in another outfit. This was repeated a couple more times before I became over-tired, refused to go to bed and clung on to the banister sobbing. Those were my dressing-up days.’

So his parents can’t have been that surprised when he told them he was gay? The temperature drops. ‘No,’ he says icily. ‘I think they were very surprised.’ He sighs. He frowns. He unscrews the top of a bottle of fizzy water, making it hiss angrily. ‘Look,’ he snaps. ‘Does everything have to be about me being gay?’ He takes a swig from the bottle. ‘Why can’t we talk about my new film?’

But he, er, plays a gay character in his new film, as he did in his last one and the one before that. And Another Country, his first film, was about homosexuality and betrayal in public schools. ‘Yes, but we’re not talking about them, are we? We’re talking about me being gay, as usual. Why are you so interested? Are you a closet fag? Would you ask a straight person about what they did with their parents’ clothes aged six?’

Of course I would, I say, if I thought it would offer some insights into the person.

There is a cold fury in his eyes now. His nostrils dimple in and out as his breathing quickens. Nasty Rupert has taken possession. ‘Yes. But with me it is the only thing that people are interested in. People aren’t just about their sexuality – and it’s very, very frustrating.’

What to do? Make a run for it? Faint? I slowly cover my head with my hands and draw my knees up to my chest. It seems to lighten the mood. He sighs once more, this time more calmly, and says: ‘OK. OK.’

He stands up and walks over to the window again, his back to me. ‘I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with talking about a person’s sex life. I’m just saying it can’t be the only identification point.’ He turns to face me. Pauses for dramatic effect. ‘It is provincial and old-fashioned to make it so.’ Fair enough, I say, let’s look for a different identification point then. Everett changed his identity radically in the mid-1980s when he left London to live in Paris – stayed there for a decade before coming back to make The Madness of King George. Was it a self-imposed exile? ‘I wanted to get out of England,’ he says flopping back down on the sofa, no longer in a strop. Nice Rupert.

Why? ‘Because everything had gone wrong. I wasn’t getting the jobs. I was feeling paranoid. I wanted to escape the attention that I was getting. It was pretty negative [two pop songs he had recorded were panned]. I went for one weekend to Paris and thought, “I’m so crazy, I could get out of all this negativity and move here,” and I did, the next week. And I didn’t understand French much at first and lived in this blissful fantasy world. I reinvented myself – and had a new character because I couldn’t express myself. All my new friends thought I was rather mournful.’

Were they right? ‘Yes, I do get depressed. Not so much recently though.’

What’s changed? ‘My spirits were low in my twenties because everything unravelled. I thought I was doing one thing, but when I looked at it objectively I was doing another. Some people would say your work is really, really fantastic, that you’re like a matinée idol from the 1950s, and others would say it’s really, really crap. Both were partly true, but neither was the whole truth. When this was happening to me it was at the time I was exploring my sexuality [he didn’t decide he was totally gay until he was 26], and it is a very trippy thing, like being in a kaleidoscope. So you spend a lot of the time bewildered and confused and having dysfunctional relationships.’

So were those his wilderness years? ‘They weren’t wilderness years for me, no. I’ve always been forced to move on and probably always will be. But wilderness years, no. Moved to France, learnt two languages [French and Italian], and working there set me up for my next successful moment.’

Is there anything he would change about himself now? ‘Everything and nothing. I like being Rupert Everett but I’d also like to be a muscly black billionaire hip-hop singer.’

And so you shall, Rupert, I say, waving an imaginary wand: Ping! ‘The Sunday Telegraph,’ he says dryly, ‘the paper that just keeps giving.’ He yawns without opening his mouth.

Does he contemplate his own mortality? ‘And immortality. A lot.’ Through film? ‘Hopefully. Yes, you see a whole life ageing on screen. Life as a selection of repeats.’

He has also been ‘immortalised’ as a model, the face of Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium for Men. What was it like seeing himself on billboards everywhere? Did he become a narcissist? ‘Mm. Yeah, narcissism. I think most people who are vain have a lack of belief in their looks, they want to look better and they want people to tell them they are good-looking.’ He takes another sip of water from the neck, then swirls the bottle round and round absent-mindedly. Bored now. But did he ever look at himself in magazine ads and think, ‘Phwoar’? ‘All the time! I would go to bed with a magazine and just stare at a picture of myself. Sweet dreams!’

Does he sleep well? ‘Not the last three nights, but normally, yes.’ No guilt or angst keeping him awake? ‘Guilt for what?’ He pulls a mock nervous face. ‘What have I done now?’ Everyone feels guilty. ‘No, I don’t feel guilty at night. Only during the day.’ So he’s a man with a clear conscience? ‘Mm, lazy but well-disposed. And unpunctual. And easily bored. And quite selfish.’

Is he a good friend to his friends? ‘For the most part, but I have lapses.’

So he does. His friends speak of the bust-ups and mood swings – inevitably, he had a brief falling-out with Madonna – but he is usually quick to make up. What everyone says is that he has never been able to settle down. It’s the ‘always forced to move on’ factor he mentions. His longest relationship lasted a year – or rather his longest human relationship. A man’s best friend is said to be his dog, and that was certainly true in Everett’s case. He divides his time between London, Miami and Paris, and at one stage bought a home in Los Angeles just so that his arthritic black labrador Moise – Mo – could get the veterinary treatment it needed. And he once turned down a role on the London stage because it would have meant Mo being quarantined for six months. Mo died in November; was he heartbroken? ‘Yep.’

Will he get another dog?

‘Nope. It would be too depressing seeing another grow old and ill. You have them from puppies and they age so quickly. Always trying to keep up. So obliging.’

And would he characterise what he felt for his labrador as love?

‘Mm. The closest I have ever come to it.’ Does that surprise him? ‘Not really.’ Why? Is it because, as an actor, he has to be able to say, ‘I love you,’ to a relative stranger, in front of a film crew. ‘Yes, you can say it with as much conviction as possible, even if you hate the bitch. That’s what it’s about. When you say, “I love you,” on screen it destroys the next time you say it because it has just become a sense memory.’ He taps his long fingers together. ‘I sometimes find myself standing back from emotional situations in real life and thinking [he adopts a German accent], “Ziz is werry interestink. Later I shall go to my room and write a sonnet about it. Over a glass of dessert vine.”‘ He laughs crisply. ‘You’re looking at me as if I’m mad!’

Not mad, but sensitive, amusing, erratic – and a little bit lonely. An encounter with Everett can be a bit hair-raising – his one-man good cop, bad cop routine – but he probably feels it’s what is expected of him. So Rupert, I say as we wind the interview up, that wasn’t so bad now, was it? ‘No, not so bad.’ And, I add, we didn’t even touch on the dreaded rent-boy stuff. He looks at my tape-recorder and says quietly and with unexpected dignity: ‘That’s still running. Please. My parents read The Sunday Telegraph.’