Rupert's big Thing for Madonna

Madonna and I have been friends for about 15 years, but that probably got blown out of proportion when our new movie came out in the States. That sometimes happens, because we're playing a pair of best friends and we have been friends in real life for years, on and off.

I wanted her to be in this movie because her character, Abbie, needed to be a woman who a gay man might plausibly want to sleep with. With Madonna, you could put her in a gay disco and everyone would hit on her, gay and straight. When I first knew her I had a giant crush on her, and that made the film so much easier from my point of view.

In The Next Best Thing we play best friends, and one night we end up sleeping together, which results in her falling pregnant with my child. When our son is born we try to bring him up as normally as possible, but problems arise as our lifestyles clash and our relationship changes. I think every family has a time bomb sewn into it - though in this story it's going to go off because Abbie is stuck at home whereas Robert, my character, is living two lives.

The characters we play are like us in one sense, but quite different in others. In the movie, it was like one of those TV shows where the characters have the same names as the actors. In real life Madonna is more moody - she loves to fight but she gets over it very quickly. But there is something about Abbie that is a victim, and you could never in your wildest dreams describe Madonna in those terms.