Rea returns to his roots

Stephen Rea flops into the room and slumps down at the table. He lifts his head wearily. 'What a funny question,' he says dully, as I casually ask if he is enjoying rehearsals for Howard Davies's forthcoming production of Cyrano de Bergerac.

'I don't like rehearsals. It's hard to feel inadequate every day for eight weeks.' He slumps back down again. The interview appears to be over already. At this moment, it would be difficult to conjure up a more unlikely actor to play the verbose, romantic, swashbuckling Cyrano than the one half-asleep at our table.

Ever since he won an Oscar nomination for his role as an IRA member in his first major feature film, Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992), Rea has barely been in theatre. Alongside work with Mike Leigh, he went on to appear in other highly praised collaborations with Jordan, including The Butcher Boy, Interview With The Vampire, Michael Collins and The End Of The Affair.

In each he makes a compelling, brooding screen presence: one tends to remember Rea for his face in films rather than his dialogue; his dishevelled features carry the silent unhappiness of a man always doomed to walk in the rain.

Getting him to talk about theatre, then, is tricky. It seems as though he has dragged himself back out of a sense of duty rather than passion. Except, of course, that Rea started out in theatre; he is, in many ways, a theatre actor through and through.

So much so that returning to the National to star in the first production of this year's £10 Travelex season is a sort of homecoming. 'I was the first actor to play on all three stages at the National when it moved to the South Bank,' he says. 'Not many people know that.'

Before that he spent three years in Trevor Griffiths's The Comedians when it played at the National's former home, the Old Vic.

'The National Theatre is an immense testimony to 400 years of a national tradition,' he says. 'I can say that without sounding gung-ho because it's not my nation. I also think the new £10 season is a great continuation of the theatre's founding democratic principles.'

Rea grew up in Belfast in the 1950s and first wanted to become an actor so that he could be in the movies. 'I watched them all on TV,' he says. 'But there were no movies to be in where I came from, so I joined a theatre instead.'

It wasn't the obvious choice for a working-class boy from Northern Ireland. 'People viewed theatre with a typical, dismissive, working-class attitude: "Ah, it's not for me". But I always said there was nothing else for me. I'm alert to snobbery but