HOWZAT

When the film opens at the end of the year, there seems little reason why Whishaw’s peculiar magnetism shouldn’t make him a star. You do slightly worry for him, though. He volunteers that before the shoot he “got quite ill, actually. It suddenly hit me there was a big responsibility. You don’t need to know about my ailments, but I got a really bad stomach, couldn’t stand up, couldn’t get out of bed, blah de blah de blah”. He seems embarrassed to have mentioned it. There was no such psychosomatic reaction with Hamlet. Quite the reverse. “What made it kind of joyful was the fact that I was inexperienced and nobody knew who I was, so there was no pressure. It felt quite uncomplicated playing it.”

As for fully fledged stardom: “I get a bit scared of thinking about things like that. A lot of actors say they think they’ll never work again. Even though, deep down, you know that isn’t true, it’s a way of protecting yourself from disappointment. So, until it happens, there’s very little point in entertaining the thought.” He’s clearly entertained the thought a bit, because he has appointed a personal publicist. One of the things that’s appealing about Whishaw is an offstage air of shambling diffidence characterised by much distracted self-tousling and avoidance of eye contact. You genuinely wonder how he’ll cope if and when he goes head to head with the world’s press at the LA junkets. His response is intriguingly bullish: “I think it is just a case of acting, really. It’s another role, isn’t it?” At 25, Whishaw has already had plenty of those. He was brought up in Bedfordshire by parents who were “not into the arts in any way. I really have no idea where it comes from. From when I was very little, I used to put on plays and act out stories and characters”. He joined a youth theatre and, by the time he was 17, had been spotted and cast by William Boyd in The Trench, alongside Daniel Craig. At 18, he was the co-lead in My Brother Tom, about the intense love between two abused teenagers. “There was something full-on about the whole process of making it that really inspired me, and I suppose it stayed with me.” It stayed with him enough to consider not going to drama school, “but the work just didn’t come in ... and I knew in myself I wanted to do theatre. That had been my goal. I felt that if you wanted to do theatre, you had to really train”.

Hamlet was not his first role after Rada. In 2004, he caught the eye in His Dark Materials, the National’s epic adaptation of the Philip Pullman trilogy, as Brother Jasper, a saturnine, purple-clad scion of church authority. He won’t quite admit to feeling creatively stifled: “I could see there was something you could do with it, but it did feel like I was part of the ensemble.” The sense of feeling not quite at the heart of things was repeated with Stoned, the film about Brian Jones in which Whishaw was cleverly cast as Keith Richards, but hardly had to lift a picking finger. “I did it because I had just finished Hamlet and I didn’t really know what to do with myself. I wanted to do something that didn’t require — I dunno — tearing your heart out for three hours.”

But that is what Whishaw is always going to be best at. It’s what gave his Hamlet such a feral, almost unacted intensity. He as much as admits that is why he entered such an exposing profession in the first place: “It’s a really interesting area — how much of yourself you’re bringing to what you’re doing. I vacillate between different points of view, but I tend to think that it’s always you, and the characters you play are only bits of you. Or who else are they?”

The Seagull is at the National Theatre, SE1, until Sept 23