Clive Owen has just delivered a baby in an abandoned warehouse. The newborn sits in his arm, smeared in a coating of blood and vernix, while the mother lies beneath him, legs apart, face lathered in sweat. Owen is satisfied, but one thing remains – the umbilical cord needs to be cut. Not hesitating for a second, he reaches into his coat, pulls out an enormous gun and, much to the protestations of the terrified mother, simply blows the cord in two from point-blank range The scene is from the opening of Owen’s new action movie, Shoot ’Em Up, and is emblematic of much that follows – violent, provocative, risqué and, well, violent. In fact the film, which describes the adventures of a weapons expert called Mr Smith (Owen), who spends 90 hyperkinetic minutes planting furious lead into an ever-replenishing army of cockeyed Mafia henchmen (they’re after the baby, but this hardly matters), might well be the most violent movie that Owen has made, and perhaps just a tiny bit offensive because of it.

“I hope not,” says the 42-year-old actor today, a vision of masculinity in suit and open-necked shirt, reclining on a vast couch in a Central London hotel room. “The violence is so heightened and cartoonish that you just can’t relate it to reality. And you can’t deny that a well put-together action sequence, if done with wit and verve, can be entertaining.”

If Owen seems untroubled by the prospect of becoming the sole poster boy for contemporary screen violence it’s possibly because he’s also starring in the upcoming period drama The Golden Age. The film, a sequel to Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, stars Owen as the swaggering, piratical Sir Walter Raleigh, the sassy foil to Cate Blanchett’s uptight monarch. The role, he says, required a lot of research, including “reading two huge biographies”. It was also, he says modestly, and with a certain resigned finality, a lot of fun.

Owen shot to fame as the gambling guru in the 1998 thriller Croupier, and has more recently aced a string of heavy-hitting roles, some Oscar-nominated, that have included the screen adaptation Closer,the dystopian sci-fi Children of Men, and the impeccable heist movie Inside Man. He does deep soulful stillness to perfection, and is the swoon-inducing first choice for big-money blockbusters seeking credibility – and that includes interballistic headwreckers such as Shoot ’Em Up.

“Look,” he says, grinning slightly, “when I was pitched the film, I have to be honest, I thought, ‘This is not going to be for me.’ But then, after reading the first page, I was chuckling. I was like, ‘This is so wild! So deliberately un-PC. I have to do it.’ ” This, you quickly learn, is a typical Owen moment. He’s a tricky fish, and a conundrum of sorts, but in the nicest possible way. He has a reputation for seriousness and deflecting journalistic inquiry, yet he does so with disarming joviality, and a booming laugh. He won’t talk about his private life, and yet he mentions his wife and two daughters with ease. He has rejected LA in favour of his home in Highgate, North London, even as he reveres the glamour of Hollywood. And, most importantly, he groans at the mention of his place in the postBrosnan James Bond succession debate, despite having made numerous Bond-style commercials for BMW, and a Bond-like cameo in The Pink Panther. Even his Shoot ’Em Up director and producers consistently refer to his part in that movie as a “blue-collar James Bond”.

“The only similarity between the movies, really, is that the main guy is going to deliver during the shoot-outs,” he says, before adding, categorically, that despite the media speculation (one newspaper poll said he was 90 per cent favourite for the role) he was never actually offered Bond, and if he was, he probably wouldn’t have taken it anyway. So, is he saying that not taking the role that he wasn’t offered was a good move? He laughs, three big booms. “What I’m saying is that if you look at my career, I’ve tried to keep it as varied as I can. It’s a healthy thing to do.” Owen’s career began in 1977 at Binley Park Comprehensive, in Coventry, during a school production of Oliver! He was the fourth of five brothers raised by his working-class mother and his stepfather (his biological father, a country singer, left home when Owen was 3). He describes his childhood as “rough”, yet refuses to play the sympathy card and describes acting as a last resort for a troubled soul. Instead he says that playing the Artful Dodger in Oliver! somehow made sense, and so after leaving school he joined a youth theatre, and spent two long years on the dole. “I learnt that life can be f***ing hard,” he says, laughing again. “It was the toughest time. The work had all dried up, and I thought, ‘Is this ever going to happen?’ ”

Thankfully, he won a place at RADA, where his contemporaries included Ralph Fiennes and Jane Horrocks. He met his future wife, Sarah-Jane Fenton, soon after, at the Young Vic, where the two were starring in, appropriately enough, Romeo and Juliet. Both were young firebrands, but when success came calling for Owen, Fenton duly stepped down, and is now the devoted wife and mother who appears on Owen’s arm at premieres and awards. I ask him if they had, back in the old days, a secret Blair-Brown type agreement about which one would step aside if fame came calling? More booming laughter. “No, it was never like that. The only notable thing about it was that the relationship took a bit of time to come together, and we were doing a seven-month tour of Romeo and Juliet all over Europe. And there was an apprehension there about getting involved, because if it went wrong it would have, er, ramifications for the whole production.”

Owen had a famous false start as the smoothie hero of the yuppie-era TV drama Chancer, but then later, after lots of theatre work, seemed to emerge fully formed as an Alist star in Mike Hodges’ Croupier. The film, neglected in the UK, was championed in the States by Stanley Kubrick’s former marketing man Mike Kaplan. Owen thus became the archetypal overnight sensation, cast as the scene-stealing hitman in The Bourne Identity, a Chandler-esque tough guy in Sin City, and a raging dermatologist in Closer. In the latter film his expletive-filled rant at co-star Julia Roberts (“Because I’m a f***ing caveman!”) has already become a modern quotable classic.

Always quick to deconstruct his own image – his other roles have included a bisexual, an incestuous brother and a gay concentration camp victim – Owen can nonetheless flex his Alist screen persona at will, and effortlessly wrestle scenes from the likes of Denzel Washington in Inside Man, despite being obscured by his character’s face mask. “It was strange,” he says. “Because you finally get to act with someone like Denzel, and yet you can’t even look him in the face. But then halfway through the scene he says to me, ‘This is weird, I can’t f***ing see you!’ But, still, it worked.”

As for the future, once the Shoot ’Em Up and Golden Age hoopla has faded, he is to play a widowed dad in The Boys are Back in Town and a financial investigator in the paranoid thriller The International. After that, he’s not sure. He might do some theatre – or maybe not. In any event Owen-watchers should expect the unexpected. “I generally don’t get attracted to the more obvious leading man roles,” he says, “because, really, there’s nothing more boring than a very wholesome, straight, uncomplicated leading man.”

Shoot ’Em Up is released nationwide on Friday

THE CHANCER WHO HIT THE JACKPOT IN CROUPIER – CLIVE OWEN ON SCREEN

CHANCER (1990-91)

That jaw and baritone proclaimed themselves to Britain’s housewives when Owen played a beguiling conman in this ITV series. Beginning in the chirpy confines of a car dealership, Chancer got steadily darker. Owen honed his trademark glower as his character battled prison, death and personal demons.

CROUPIER (1998)

After a few wilderness years following his role in the 1991 incest drama Close My Eyes, Owen’s big-screen break came playing yet another morally dubious type. “He’s not really a good guy or a bad guy,” he said of the writer-turned-casino worker he played in Mike Hodges’s neo-noir. “But people generally aren’t, are they?”

CLOSER (2004)

Owen had already appeared on stage as the wimpy Dan in Patrick Marber’s savage deconstruction of sexual politics. In the film adaptation, Jude Law took that role and Owen played the inscrutable dermatologist Larry. The switch paid off, as he earned an Oscar nomination, a Bafta and a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor.

CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)

Having hefted his sword in a period piece (2004’s King Arthur), Owen dipped his toe into sci-fi as a world-weary civil servant in Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian drama. Who better to brood about a future in which suicide is rife and the human race has become infertile than Britain’s king of photogenic gloom?

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