The lucky charmer

According to the numerous column inches devoted to him, James Nesbitt is one of the most charming men on Earth. He was charm personified in long-running TV series Cold Feet and charmingly infuriating in those ubiquitous Yellow Pages commercials.

Last week he came second in a Heat magazine poll of Britain's most unlikely hunks. The prospect of meeting such a man is daunting: will he reduce me to a gibbering wreck?

Not quite, for in truth Nesbitt has been working hard in recent years to distance himself from his public persona as a twinkly Ulsterman. His latest project is Northern Irish playwright Owen McCafferty's stage play Shoot The Crow, a poignant black comedy set on a building site, in which four tilers plan, independently, to steal a crate of tiles.

It's Nesbitt's first stage role for several years. Although he did plenty of theatre after leaving the Central School Of Speech And Drama, his career has been dominated by TV and film work. Most TV actors will describe the theatre as the place they go to refine their craft and prove their credibility but Nesbitt is refreshingly candid.

'I think I've been starved for a while,' he says. 'Through my own laziness some of the time.'

As a Northern Irishman abroad, Nesbitt has always been proud of where he comes from and equally proud to have been able to draw on this heritage in his work. His TV appearances have included the steely-faced cop in Murphy's Law and Ivan Cooper, the civil rights campaigner, in Bloody Sunday.

'I don't deny that I am a Protestant Irishman,' he says, somewhat unnecessarily, given his broad accent. 'That's the wonderful thing about Murphy's Law: in having a Northern Irish character living in England, it's indirectly about Northern Ireland. And Bloody Sunday was such an extraordinary part of the history of where I come from. Now, with Shoot The Crow, I feel very lucky to be able to say the words of a Northern Irish writer who is intelligent and tries to educate other people about the richness of the Northern Irish language.'

He is particularly enamoured of the fact that Shoot The Crow is not a political play. 'I think that in a time of change it's good to have a play about working-class people from Belfast who carry no political baggage,' he says. 'Belfast today is facing a balancing act. Of course, it's about retaining a sense of Protestant identity but it also needs to be about being able to shed the damage that cultural identity can do.'

Nesbitt is clearly relishing the task of going back on stage, admitting wryly that the effort of learning his lines is costing him sleep. Yet he also hints that this new role is emotionally symbolic as well as professionally significant. He even goes so far as to call it a Renaissance moment.

'Maybe I consciously didn't do theatre for a while because I was scared by the extent to which it requires you to open yourself up,' he says. 'At the risk of sounding like a w***er, the most interesting thing about this has been reminding myself of the power of discussion. When you're rehearsing, you are constantly debating things and you do find out a lot about yourself.'

It's taken him several decades to reconcile the idea of himself as an actor with his own ingrained Protestant work ethic. 'When I was younger, there was clearly conflict between the two. One was something you did for fun and the other was what life was about. Only now am I beginning to see the two can coexist.'