Big bad Dom

I am witnessing Man in Kitchen. Dominic West is attempting to make coffee. 'What, no coffee?' he rails at the heavens with a bellow that puts Brian Blessed to shame. 'Aha. Coffee,' he roars triumphantly, producing a foil-wrapped package from the fridge. 'Oh no. It's cheese,' he deflates. We decide on tea and he declares Assam to be the thing and starts fiddling around with loose leaves while delving into drawers for a strainer, finally settling for a large sieve which causes spillage and necessitates much mopping up. We wander out into his garden to sit on some banged-up red benches.

Last time I met Dominic West, four years ago, he was among those tipped for the Bond job that went to Daniel Craig. 'I was pretending to be laid-back about it,' he says, 'but I absolutely would have loved to have done it. Also, though, there was a school of thought - that I was trying to subscribe to - that it was a bit of a poisoned chalice because the films had got so bad. You forget now because it's so good. I think a few people would have paused before accepting it. I would have paused for about half a millisecond before reluctantly taking up the mantle. It was all looking a bit dinosaur-like before Daniel Craig came along. He's a good actor and it makes all the difference.'

The popularity of The Wire, so named because of the telephone tap the police use to catch criminals, grew, cult-like, through DVD box sets and illegal downloads until, last year, Londoners began to catch on. The entire 60 episodes have, only this week, begun to be broadcast on BBC Two, but Barack Obama has declared it his favourite show, and numerous publications, including Time magazine, have named it the best television drama of all time. 'There is a sense among people who have watched it that they are part of a secret society,' says Dominic.

It is not an easy watch, though. The language is hard to follow, emotional pay-offs come at the end of each series rather than each episode and the dramatised reportage style is both confusing and wearying, but it is immensely satisfying and has lifted Dominic's image beyond that of vaguely interchangeable, almost famous, public-school hottie and given him status, credibility and marketability even greater than Clooney's in ER. And look what happened to him. Dominic has that rare quality of looking lithe and luminously handsome or heavy-featured, simian and menacing depending on the day, the lighting, the character. I do not think he is a vain man.

He denies that his time playing McNulty has given him any kind of sixth sense or X-ray vision when it comes to seeing street deals and dodgy interactions that you or I might miss. 'The difference between a good policeman and a bad one is an ability to read the streets,' he says. 'I went around with them quite a lot and they can tell, from tiny signs, what everyone is doing. Poncing around pretending to be a cop doesn't quite cut it.' He does, however, point out supposed crack houses on his street and says that the fast food joint at the end of the road is a 'crack supermarket'.

Nonetheless, this corner of Shepherd's Bush has an old-fashioned blustery, blossomy Victorian charm on this spring morning. He moved to this house last October with his girlfriend, the garden designer Catherine Fitzgerald, their two-year-old daughter Dora, eight-month-old son Senan and, part of the time, his nine-year-old daughter Martha, from a relationship with Polly Astor that ended when Martha was two. He and Catherine, a glowy rose of a woman who used to be married to the Earl of Durham and whose father is Desmond, 29th Knight of Glin, are expecting another child at the beginning of June and their airy house over-flows with baby paraphernalia. They first got together at Trinity College Dublin but she left him shortly after. They remained part of the same group of friends and reconnected four years ago. 'We've been trying to get married for the past three years but then another baby comes along and ruins it,' he says. 'So we've decided to do it very simply. Catherine's parents have this amazing place in Ireland [Glin Castle], and she kept saying, "We'll just do a register office and the pub."' I said, "We could do that... or we could go to your castle." Anyway, she's won and we are going to Hammersmith register office and then the pub round the corner.'

West studied English at Trinity before embarking on a three-year postgraduate drama course at the Guildhall. As soon as he left, work started to trickle in, his father had a liver transplant and his parents split up after 30 years of marriage. His father moved to Ireland. 'He went there because he thought my mum would follow him,' says Dominic. 'She's always said that she wanted to live there so he thought that if he went and got some idyllic place then maybe she'd come.' She didn't; neither did she remarry. She still lives in the Yorkshire house that Dominic grew up in.

'Dad had ten good years after the transplant and then he died within three weeks. It was odd because they told him the operation would give him ten years and he was a very religious man and he was always trying to work out what he was here for. As far as I was concerned, I had an amazing time with him then. He always had ten years in his sights, and it was almost to the day that he checked out.'