Chaplin shows he's no Charlie

The then Mrs Tom Cruise was aggressively coming on to the boy from Windsor, watched by a crew of 50, filming every intimate detail. He thought the scene, involving more bondage than dialogue, and shot a staggering 12 times, would never end. Weeks later, after many long days of Kidman kissing, tying, untying and bringing Chaplin to 'climax', he still wasn't having what most men would consider the time of their lives.

'People think they'd like the job, but that's because they haven't done it,' says Chaplin about his racy bondage scenes with Kidman in Birthday Girl, the story of an ostensibly boring English bank clerk who orders a Russian bride (from hell) over the internet.

'You walk on to the set naked in front of 50 people. It's terribly embarrassing. I'm shy, honestly,' says Chaplin, 31. 'I have never been exhibitionistic in that way. I don't even like taking my top off at the beach.

'I admit that with Nicole it was as close to fun as it could be, because she is so free. But in one scene I had to slap her while she was tied to a radiator - it was a hard slap, but she asked for it. I mean, she literally asked for it. It's never easy to hit anyone, but it's particularly hard to hit a woman, especially Nicole Kidman. There are times when you wonder: "What am I doing for a living?"'

Birthday Girl is Chaplin's first British film in eight years. Since the mid-Nineties, when he moved to Los Angeles to live with then girlfriend Embeth Davidtz and landed the lead in the sleeper hit The Truth About Cats & Dogs, he's been working in America. The success of the film launched him, for a time, into the stratosphere. In Hollywood they call it buzz, and in 1995 the buzz was Ben. Scripts bearing characters who were English, charming and romantic (his role in Cats & Dogs) began arriving by the truckload, and although he refused all entreaties to reprise that Hugh Grant-like character - 'One more role like Cats & Dogs would have stung me for years' - he kept landing plum parts opposite actors whose A-list status means they only need to use one name: Winona, George, Sandra, Sean and now Nicole.

And what about Nicole? 'She really surprised me,' he says. 'She is so hard-working, you'd think someone like that would eventually blow a gasket, but she never did.'

Before Chaplin arrives at a pool hall in downtown Manhattan - his choice - for a chat, you can't help wondering whether after so many years in Los Angeles, he will have gone all soft and celebrity on us. It happens to the best of them. One day they are on stage at the Donmar; the next they are into power yoga, juicing and Botox.

It's after 11am when he arrives, and far from doing yoga, Chaplin (no relation to Charlie - he took his mother's maiden name upon discovering another Ben Greenwood in Equity) is still wiping the sleep from his eyes. He's just got up. His lanky frame is bundled up inside a brown leather jacket. He looks a bit dog-eared round the edges, revealing his tweedy, middle-class, Home Counties origins. He was brought up in Windsor, the youngest of four children - his father was an engineer, his mother a drama teacher. He apologises for running late, something no real celebrity would do. (Making them wait in Hollywood is de rigueur, didn't he get the memo?) There is no mention of a personal trainer or entourage. Once he lights up the first cigarette of many - smoking is more persona non grata than mainlining heroin in LA - you realise he doesn't play by the Hollywood book.

But the real clue to how little damage Hollywood has done to Chaplin is that he is still remarkably scandal- free. There are no arrests with ladies of the night, and only two girlfriends in six years. He's a real self-deprecating homebody who's quick to dismiss his good looks. 'Did you know that the two websites about me have both expired?' he volunteers, mid-conversation. 'You can always measure your heat by the number of sites, so I guess that's it for me. I'm just not sexy any more.'

Clearly untrue. Jude, Ewan, Ralph, Colin, Hugh and now Ben: the American appetite for handsome, skinny Brits with floppy forelocks appears insatiable. 'Somehow, American women think we are more interesting, educated, charming and eloquent than their own men,' says Chaplin. 'It must be the characters we play - the love interest, the vulnerable, self-deprecating guy. But there is a downside. American women love it when you are being witty, but they find it hard to take Englishmen seriously. If you say something heartfelt, they always think you are joking.'

After he broke up with Davidtz, he met a New Yorker, a woman not in the business whom he will not name but professes to adore. She is the real reason he is in the Big Apple. And despite rumours of an affair between Chaplin and Kidman on the set of Birthday Girl, he swears it never happened. 'I was waiting for the scandal to start because of the material. Sorry to disappoint you, but the only sex between us was on screen.'

In person, he is so obviously a one-woman man, full of gentle, almost feminine empathy. 'I do think it's hard for the girlfriend of an actor to handle it when we shoot love scenes,' he says rationally. 'I think they are fully justified in picking someone off the street and snogging them, just to make us see how it feels. Of course I wouldn't accept that, but I expect her to understand it's part of my job.'

I ask Chaplin if he wants to be famous, really famous. After all, he did have the opportunity to embrace Nicole-sized wattage at one point, and perhaps now regrets he played the hand badly. 'When, and if, your career takes off, you can't choose,' he says. 'The public decides they like you and that is what happened to me in Cats & Dogs. I could look at it on a psychological level and say I didn't capitalise on it because I was running away from stardom, but I don't think that's true. I just didn't want to reprise that role again. I am very choosy. I never want to pick my parts to sustain stardom, I only want roles that interest me.'

But before you think Chaplin is too modest or too choosy for his own good (after all, even Ewan did Star Wars), he confesses to a yearning so showbizzy and superficial that you are momentarily stunned. Yes, along with every other actor since time memorial, he wants to win an Oscar. 'I don't want to admit it, but I would love it,' he grins.

In 1995, he was nominated for an Olivier for The Glass Menagerie at the Donmar. 'Then I didn't care about winning.'

Now he does, but - phew! - it's for all the right, grown-up reasons. 'Look, I don't want one because of the fuss. The thing is they really do help your career. That's the only reason,' he insists. 'I think if you buy into the award stuff beyond that, you're just asking to be bitten hard on the ass.'

Birthday Girl is released on 28 June

Birthday Girl
Cert: cert15