Why Hodge is wild about Harry

Douglas Hodge has always been picky about television. Last year, he took major roles in two well-received BBC serials, The Russian Bride and the Trollope adaptation The Way We Live Now. But it was 1996's Middlemarch that put him in the spotlight. He wore breeches, and everyone got, well, rather excited. He could have had a more illustrious career on the box - he has had plenty of offers - but instead he met Harold Pinter and quietly carved out a reputation as the leading Pinter actor of his generation. It's not Jonathan Creek, but it will do.

Today he is bald - he's shaved off his dark hair - and is engaged on the phone with the AA about his car, which has been stuck the other side of London for three days. He looks too young to play Leontes in the RSC's forthcoming production of The Winter's Tale, but he's not bothered, pointing out that Leontes must be at an age where he can have kids. He's more worried about how to play this raging maniac who starts at full tilt and stays there for most of the play. 'I'll just be as honest as I can,' he says. 'And the thing about Shakespeare is that the more you do it, the more revelatory it becomes.'

Hodge started out in Shakespeare, first in rep and then at the National. It is, he says, a great love. But it's no coincidence that this production is his first for the RSC. 'The company used to leave me cold,' he says. 'All those leather trousers and people shouting at each other. This production is very un-RSC. It's set in 1950s America, with Arcadia in bluegrass country. Plus it's in promenade at the Roundhouse - a place I love and which has staged some of the most exciting theatre and music I've ever seen. We want to capitalise on that actually - some bands are booked to play some nights after the show. And also, I don't have to go to Stratford.'

Therein lies the rub. Hodge is precisely the kind of actor RSC artistic director Adrian Noble had in mind when he radicalised the company at the end of last year, dismantling the ensemble structure and breaking with the Barbican. Had Hodge been presented - as he initially was - with a contract that would have tied him down for the rest of the year, he would have refused. 'I've got filming commitments,' he says simply. 'Plus I get bored very quickly. If I had to stay with the same part for longer than three months, I'd go insane.'

Hodge doesn't see himself as a particular advocate for change at the RSC, rather he thinks the current fuss surrounding it can be explained by the sense of ownership the public feels towards the company. 'Noble's job is a bit like the England manager's; everyone wants to have their say about it.' Instead, he is just pleased to be presented with an exciting project. 'It's an extraordinarily modern play,' he says. 'If you've ever lost a parent or a lover and dreamed beyond belief that one day they would come into the room and kiss you on the fore-head, well, the play taps into that very human desire for reconciliation with extraordinary potency, I think.'

Describing himself as a reluctant actor, he constantly doubts whether he is cut out for the profession. Yet his career has been buoyed by two great mentors. The first was his teacher at the National Youth Theatre, Michael Croft: 'He made acting as exciting as football'. The second was Pinter. Meeting him was a turning point: 'I had been out of work for ages and had applied to join the fire service. I was told I was too old. The next day, I got a part with Pinter in No Man's Land at the Almeida. He hadn't written a play for 15 years. We got on immediately. The world of his plays makes sense to me. Pinter is, without a doubt, the greatest living playwright.'

Hodge has spent most of the last eight years doing Pinter plays - most recently with Michael Gambon in The Caretaker. It's been the making of him as an actor. He still might give it all up and do something else... 'But then, projects such as this come along and I find myself saying yes.'