“There’s a website with quotations describing it,” Pete Postlethwaite chuckles. “When I was at a film festival in France last week, they said it was ‘comme une gargouille’,‘like a gargoyle’. ” Postlethwaite is talking, of course, about his face — that bony piece of abstract art reappearing this week on DVD in the Australian comedy Strange Bedfellows.

Quiz your average star about their facial features and you will get at best a frosty silence, at worst be removed from the room. But Postlethwaite treats such probing with the same pragmatism as he does every question. Does he think his distinctiveness has helped his career? “It’s not done any harm,” he says. “But you are what you are, so that’s it.”

While the face remains the same, Postlethwaite’s voice is his most mutable weapon. Capable of suggesting affability and malice, diffidence and fury, it’s been the audio highlight of some of the most striking films of the late 1980s and 1990s. There was the Scouse snarl of his loathsome father in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988); the beleaguered brogue of Giuseppe Conlon in In the Name of the Father (1993); the chilling drone of his lawyer in The Usual Suspects (1995). Only the Yorkshire vowels of his gruff bandleader in Brassed Off (1996) bore a resemblance to the voice I’m hearing now.

Famously, Postlethwaite’s craftsmanship is said to have convinced Steven Spielberg — who cast him in The Lost World and Amistad (both 1997) — that he was “the best actor in the world”. He has a classy response to such nonsense: “What he actually said was: ‘Pete thinks he is the best actor in the world.’” Regardless, it was a heady time, but Postlethwaite — who once fired an agent for suggesting he change his name — resisted Hollywood. Nor was he in thrall to the big names, turning down a part in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York on discovering he was to be paid below union scale: “You can’t be blackmailed just because somebody is somebody.”

It was the travelling that persuaded him to slow down. “I was doing three different projects at the same time,” recalls Postlethwaite, who has just turned 60. Recently, his high profile outings have been sporadic, though there have been notable television appearances in The Sins (2000) and Lost for Words (1999), and an acclaimed one-man theatre show, Scaramouche Jones. It was while performing the latter in Australia that he was invited to appear in Strange Bedfellows.

A straight-to-video effort in which he plays a goverment inspector investigating a pair of men posing as a gay couple, it’s not his most prestigious project. Still, it gave Postlethwaite the chance to work in an unfamiliar country opposite one of its most famous sons, Paul Hogan. “Going over to Australia to play an Australian in front of the iconic Aussie — that’s the kind of thing that keeps you active.”

It certainly seems to have reawoken Postlethwaite’s passion for the front line: his next films are directed by two of cinema’s most gifted young Turks. In Walter Salles’s Dark Water, he plays a Lithuanian-American janitor and adds another “really strange accent” to his collection. Even more intriguing is The Constant Gardener, an adaptation of John le Carré’s Kenya-set novel by Salles’s fellow Brazilian, Fernando Meirelles. The City of God director left Postlethwaite bemused with his maverick modus operandi. “You would be forgiven for thinking the camera would be in the same place for each take,” he says. “Not with Fernando. You just have to do the scene, never mind where the camera is.”

These are exciting times for Postlethwaite, though you wouldn’t know it to listen to him. “These things happen,” he says with the air of a man for whom running around Africa with loopy Brazilians is on a par with a pint in the pub. “These things happen,” he repeats. “You know what I mean?”

• Strange Bedfellows is out to buy on DVD and video

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