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Tony Leung has been called the Clark Gable of Asia, and it’s not hard to see why: he’s handsome, with the enviable frame of a man who can put on anything knowing it will both flatter him and fit him. Leung, 45, has been a star in Hong Kong for a quarter of a century, but he remains most famous outside his homeland for a string of films with the lyrical maverick Wong Kar Wei. Wong first cast him in Days of Being Wild (1991) and four collaborations later gave him the role of his career, in the beautiful Sixties love story In the Mood for Love (2000).

Leung plays the part like a matinee idol, in chic suits and open-collared shirts, with a casual slouch that recalls the golden age of Hollywood. Nobody smokes quite like him – not even the actor himself, who claims he only lights up at Wong’s insistence.

In Wong’s films, Leung is always the good guy, so his fans might be somewhat shocked by his starring role in the latest masterwork by the Taiwanese genius Ang Lee, set during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the Second World War. Titled Lust, Caution and adapted from a short story by the late Eileen Chang, it’s an intense film about revenge and betrayal, starring the newcomer Tang Wei as Wang Jiazhi, an idealistic drama student who is swept up in a three-year plot by student radicals to kill Mr Yee (Leung), a collaborator with the Japanese invaders.

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Leung’s presence is gentle at first, but this doesn’t pan out like the parts we’re using to seeing him play: instead, he rapes, beats and settles into an affair with Wang in a film that sometimes recalls the once-scandalous In the Realm of the Senses.

These scenes are all the more surprising given that Leung claims to be, intrinsically, a shy person. He became an actor at 19, after selling home appliances, and saw drama school as a way to deal with his chronic shyness. Abandoned by his father as a child, he was raised by his mother. “I was embarrassed to come from a broken family,” he says. “I stopped trying to communicate. I dared not talk about my family, I didn’t want to tell my classmates that I didn’t have a father."

His private life today is similarly under wraps, and the unmarried actor’s on-off 18-year relationship with the Hong Kong actress Carina Lau is something he refuses to discuss, most likely because Lau was kidnapped in 1990 and subjected to humiliating sexual abuse by Triad gangsters, allegedly as retribution for reneging on a film deal.

Leung is shy and soft-spoken, speaking semi-fluent English with an easy manner that belies Yee’s savagery. “I was very excited about this film,” he says slowly, “both because of Ang and because I’d never played this kind of character before. Yee is a very dark, very complicated character, and this was all new to me. I’m used to playing very fragile, good-looking men, but this time Ang said he wanted to see a new Tony Leung. He wanted me to change a lot of things, even my expression and my body language.”

To do this, Lee put Leung through a boot camp of sorts. “He showed me some Humphrey Bogart movies,” Leung recalls. “I never think I can play masculine characters, so I think that’s why he showed me those films with Bogart, Richard Burton and Marlon Brando. He wanted me to try to imitate their masculine quality.”

The relationship Yee enters into with Wang can safely be described as abusive, and gives rise to some of the film’s most shocking and uncomfortable scenes. “He doesn’t mean to torture her,” Leung explains. “But through torturing her he can assure himself of his own existence.

“I think a guy like him is under a lot of pressure, working as a secret agent. His job is to kill people every day, sometimes his friends or his colleagues, so he needs to be self-denying. He needs to shut down his emotions, and that kind of man is very stressed, very tense, as I found out from studying the real history. They didn’t even dare to sleep; they were so scared that they might be killed at any minute.

“What I think is that Mr Yee is a human at the very beginning, but after the war starts he turns into an animal. That’s what Ang emphasised. He said: ‘I don’t care how you create the character, but you are a wolf. Just a wolf.’ ” The scenes that follow Yee’s transformation are explicit, even for this permissive cinematic age, but Leung shrugs off the controversy. “I’d done some films with love scenes before, but they weren’t that intense, they didn’t go that far. But it’s no big deal for professional actors. We’re not doing porno, we’re not just trying to show the bodies of the actors, we’re trying to explore the minds of the characters. I don’t think that’s a big deal; I’m just trying to do my job.”

He says that, as one might imagine, Lee was very precise about the sexual content, which required a lot of commitment – not to say agility – from his two leading players. “We rehearsed a lot with just the three of us,” says Leung. “Ang would tell us the position and the camera angle. He was very clear about what he wanted to express, and what the characters were experiencing. In the first sex scene, it’s like Lee has been looking for something that he has been missing for three years, but it doesn’t go the way he thinks it will, so he’s very angry. She’s acting so differently, she’s acting so strange, she’s not the innocent girl that he met before, so he’s very angry, very violent, and he rapes her. In the second, we’re exploring each other, and the third one is . . . we are getting lost.”

Lust, Caution took six months of Leung’s life to make and though it was emotionally gruelling he went straight into another exhausting movie, John Woo’s Red Cliff. “We’re about halfway through,” he sighs, “so I’ve got to work for another two or three months. It’s a very big production but the situation is very harsh. The weather is very unstable, so it’s really tough.

“It’s a historical epic, set around 200-something AD, about the Battle of Red Cliffs, in China. Physically it’s very difficult because we’re all wearing winter costumes, but we were shooting in the summer, in 40C, wearing this armour that weighs 20lb. There are thousands of people on set every day.”

Surely, though, it must be a relief after the psychological pressures of Lust, Caution? Surprisingly, not. “No, I don’t think so,” he grins. “I enjoyed Lust, Caution very much.”

Lust, Caution shows at The Times BFI London Film Festival, Odeon West End, on Saturday at 8pm, and Tuesday at 12.45pm. It goes on general release on January 4 2008

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