Bayfield goes from lock to luvvie

Assuming, correctly, that Bayfield had been picked solely because he stands 6ft 10in tall in his socks, his friends made the assumption that he would be the Hollywood equivalent of a one-cap wonder.

Well, Bayfield has news for them. Today, armed with an Equity card, he reveals his ambition to make a new name for himself as an actor. After pounding the beat, locking the scrum and singing for his corporate supper as a speaker par excellence, he is ready at 34 to tread the boards.

'In rugby, I hit every one of my goals and had a wonderful time doing it,' he said. 'Now I want to do the same with acting. It may be a bit of a laugh for my rugby friends who insist on calling me "Luvvie" and "Darling", but being involved in the Harry Potter film was such a great experience that it has sparked something in me.

'My ambition now is to become a serious actor. I don't have a clue whether I will ever achieve it but I will have failed myself unless I try. What I did in the film I think I did very well. I want to do more and I have the utmost confidence that I can.'

This time last year, encouraged by his wife Helena to seize the giant opportunity, Bayfield cut the umbilical cord tying him to Northampton rugby, informing club owner Keith Barwell that he was leaving 'to go into the movies'.

Sworn to secrecy about the first Potter film, he hopes to land a part in the next one - undaunted, it seems, by Sir Laurence Olivier's condemnation of a thespian's lot. 'Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism,' the great performer once said. 'It is not quite the occupation of an adult.'

Bayfield, 'discovered' when one of the casting crew heard him speak at a rugby bash in a London brewery, has a boyish enthusiasm to succeed. 'It's only when you get involved in the making of a film that you get some idea of the phenomenal skills of everyone involved. These people are geniuses.

'I'll never forget that first day on location. When I played rugby for England, I was ready because I had trained for it. This, though, was a completely different world, so I was far more nervous that I ever had been at Twickenham.

'You had cameras all over the place and when the director shouted "Action" on that first day, I thought: "Wow, what am I doing here?" All very bizarre, but very exciting and then I decided to milk this for everything I could because I may not get another opportunity. The feedback from what I did over a period of six months has been very good.

'You watch people like Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith perform and you wonder: "How do they make it look so easy?" It could almost be deemed insulting to them that some upstart comes along and says he wants to be an actor.

'I'm coming into it very late and the chances are that I will never be anywhere as good as they are. All I've done is be the body double for Robbie Coltrane and now I want to have a crack at becoming an actor in my own right.'