From the Archive: The boats may have rocked, but the Sixties didn't

It’s not surprising to learn that the best bits of the new Richard Curtis comedy The Boat that Rocked came from the twisted imagination of Rhys Ifans. The 40-year-old Welsh hellraiser, paparazzi baiter and scene-stealing character actor was given free rein to indulge his inner wild man.

Playing the snake-hipped DJ Gavin, the lusty, leery broadcasting powerhouse of Radio Rock (a floating North Sea music station in the 1966-set movie’s homage to the golden era of pirate radio), he brought a sexual menace to the role that didn’t exist on the page. When, for instance, Gavin lifts his crotch up to the live microphone and slowly unzips himself — “That was mine,” he says. When Gavin slaps a naked centrefold against the window of his DJ box — “That was mine too.

“Basically, all the filth is mine, I’m afraid,” he says. “All the really cheap, South Park-y bits. They’re all mine.”

Ifans says all this with a louche, heavy-lidded smile. He is here, in the uncharacteristic surroundings of a London hotel boardroom suite (his preferred interview locations in the past have been pubs and working men’s clubs), dressed in dusty grey jacket and jeans in what seems to be part of a concerted rebranding exercise.

Thus although he smokes continuously, slurs sleepily through several answers (he is clutching what appears to be a postprandial digestif) and blares some AC/DC on the room’s plasma screen before the interview begins, he is nonetheless guarded by a stony-faced personal publicist who sits directly in his line of sight and is here to steer our conversation away from personal inquiry at all costs. Any personal questions, we have been warned, and Ifans walks.

By personal questions, of course, we mean Ifans’s relationship with ex-girlfriend Sienna Miller and his exploits as part of a hard-partying North London-based social set that has included the interpenetrating adventures of Miller, Kate Moss, Jude Law, Sadie Frost, Liam Gallagher and many more. Their stories have filled pages and Ifans’s break-up with Miller, in particular, was conducted, seemingly painfully, under the prurient strobe of paparazzi flashbulbs.

So now, with a movie as jaunty and featherweight as a Richard Curtis comedy to promote, seems as good a time as any to relaunch Ifans as an actor of merit (he has a Bafta award, an Emmy nomination and some knock-out performances to his name), but one completely devoid of a personal life. For the moment, everything about the man must be inferred from his movie choices.

Anyone who’s seen him in Enduring Love, as the fey, soft-eyed stalker who torments Daniel Craig’s disillusioned teacher, will know that he’s capable of breathtaking work. But for so long, and perhaps thanks to his breakout turn as Spike, the wacky Welsh flatmate in another Curtis comedy, Notting Hill, Ifans seemed to have been cast exclusively in the so-called zany firebrand cameo role — he was the party maniac in The Replacements, the Devil’s older brother in Little Nicky and the hedonistic bully Eyeball Paul in Kevin & Perry Go Large. “There was a period like that after Notting Hill,” he agrees. “Because Spike was such an extreme character people couldn’t see any farther than the character itself. He became an iconic figure, especially in America where, if there was a script with anyone unkempt, unshaven and clumsy in it, I got f***ing sent it.”

Has he forgiven Curtis for the effect that Spike had on his career? “No, I thank him for it,” he says. “By no stretch of the imagination was it depressing or heartbreaking, and I’d rather have played him than not. And now, all credit to Richard for having the foresight to see me as someone half-shaggable in this — I’ve gone from unshaggable to shaggable. And thank f*** it happened in that order.”

After Notting Hill key roles, such as the oversexed enfant sauvage in Human Nature, or Jed in Enduring Love, or Colin the nervous ex-copper turned social worker in Chromophobia, illustrated Ifans’s strengths as a screen actor — with long, feminine lashes and a mouth that seems permanently on the cusp of a grin, he can hold an extreme close-up indefinitely (just watch his scene opposite Craig in a Hampstead café in Enduring Love). Yet they were also united by a sense of danger, darkness and eccentricity, and seemed to reveal an actor pushing at the boundaries. He played much of Human Nature, for instance, completely naked. “I’m perhaps more fearless than other actors, but it doesn’t mean I’m better than them,” he says. “I’ve been to unpretty places with the roles I’ve played, and I’m attracted to reckless abandon. I like being taken to the edge of my own abyss.”

Where does that come from? Within you? Why do you go there? Ifans flinches. The publicist stops tapping at her BlackBerry. Panic. “Is this a personal question?” all three of us wonder. Ifans breaks the silence. “I only go there when I’m paid to visit it,” he says diplomatically. “It’s a complicated place, and acting is a great cathartic enabler. But I try not to think about it too much. It’s a job, and if you think about it too much it becomes a recipe, instead of a taste sensation.” He pauses, then laughs at his own pretensions. “That was f***ing good, wasn’t it?” We nod. All three of us.

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