Sitting in a loud, louche café in deepest Brixton, his bright blue jacket zipped up as tightly as his lips, the actor Ben Miles is oddly terse during a routine interview. Admittedly, I’ve been interviewing hermits in India for six months (don’t ask), and my technique may be slightly skewed. But I can confirm that living alone in a Himalayan cave for seven years seems to render a man less reticent than starring in a slew of primetime British television shows.

We’re here to talk about his starring role in My Child, a new play at the Royal Court. In some ways it couldn’t be further from the show for which he is best known, Coupling, the BBC’s riposte to Friends. For four series Miles graced our screens as the unflinching philanderer Patrick Maitland, flailing his way across the no man’s land of the great gender divide.

My Child, on the other hand, promises to plunge its audience into the dark, slippery terrain of what it means to be a good parent in a heartless modern world. Mike Bartlett’s depiction of trampled paternity rights portrays an unnamed Man with an obsolete set of moral values being methodically eradicated from his own life. His wife remarries, his child finds him cloying, his mother-in-law can’t remember why she liked him. But My Child marks familiar Miles territory in the yawning gulf between his character and any kind of understanding of the opposite sex: “Just go away,” his vitriolic ex-wife (Lia Williams) spits at his uncomprehending back. “Erase yourself.”

Yet this sun-kissed 40-year-old is unimpressed by the notion that he took the play to explore the gender divide from another angle. “I take the best bit of writing that comes my way,” he says. “That’s all. I’m not trying to typecast myself.

“ My Child is a very dark play,” he explains patiently, “very oppressive, claustrophobic. All the characters are under great pressure and the look of the set is really going to hammer that home. The actors and the audience will come in together and you might get a shock when the person next to you starts talking. Unless you know the face, you won’t know they’re an actor.”

It’s unlikely that whoever ends up next to Miles will be unaware that he’s an actor. On stage he most recently appeared as the oppressed Bolingbroke opposite Kevin Spacey’s Richard II at the Old Vic in 2005. But it’s on television that he has become most prominent. He starred recently in After Thomas, an ITV weepie about autism, but he has featured regularly in The Forsythe Saga, Cold Feet and Prime Suspect. His CV reads like a pick-of-the-week column for the past seven years of British television.

But getting him to talk about it doesn’t get any easier. I put it to him that he is best known as an inveterate womaniser, following Coupling with the less sparkling A Thing Called Love – roles that might be seen as sexist. He tells me to talk to the writers. He’s just an actor. Miles is unpretentious to the point of sounding uninterested.

He was born in London and brought up in Nottingham, mainly by his mother, as his father was a travelling vacuum-cleaner salesman in Africa and the Middle East. He became an actor, he says, “mainly because it was a good way to get out of maths”.

He trained at the Guildhall, and spent his twenties standing at the back of some illustrious stages – the RSC, the National, the Young Vic. In one production he met his wife, the actress Emily Raymond, with whom he now has three children and lives in Queen’s Park, northwest London.

It was thanks to Coupling, which was first shown in 2000, that he started to stand nearer the front of those same illustrious stages. “It did change things for me,” he says. “It was unashamedly rude, but it never lost its charm. I think England is one of the few places you’d get away with it. The American attempt” – NBC remade it in 2003 – “didn’t work at all. We have a tradition of being very filthy in this country. Sex, toilets, oddness. It’s very English.”

But Miles downplays any notion of stardom. “It never got to the point where I was hassled in Sainsbury’s. Around series three it got popular, and then the DVD sales went through the roof, so you got the money without the hassle, which is great. It’s my idea of hell, being in Heat magazine every week.”

Miles is genial and straight-talking but he is doggedly unprepared to make any grand statements about his profession (“There was a problem with theatre under Thatcher? I suppose so, I didn’t really notice”), the play he’s found himself in (“You could say it’s about gender, you could say it’s about other things”), his career path (“I didn’t have a plan, I took what came along”). My tape recorder fleetingly grabs his attention: during a dry patch in his twenties, Miles trained to be a sound engineer.

His determined reticence might just be down to hunger. His chicken burger is taking an inordinately long time to materialise, he’s had a long day and a long cycle ride from Queen’s Park to rehearsals in Brixton. And I can’t help but notice that he’s more engaged by the conversation that he’s having with the waitress about his side-order than in the interview he’s intermittently giving me.

So I’m inclined to plump for the hunger angle. Especially given the one thing I was able to pin Miles down on. “Men and women are different,” he says. So would he say that the pendulum of power has swung too far towards women? And that shows such as My Childdraw attention to the dangers of that imbalance? “No,” he smiles, though a defiant mouthful of chips, “I’d say that men and women are different.”

My Child previews at the Royal Court, SW1 (020-7565 5000), from Thurs and opens on May 9

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Kate Isitt appeared in the series Strictly Confidential.

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