Almost drowning in debt, Rain Man star Neil Morrissey tells Viv Hardwick that he’s determined to pay off his creditors.

"I’LL be in debt until I’m over 50,” says Neil Morrissey in jokey fashion about his recent business disaster which saw him lose his life savings as he plunged £2.5m into the red as plans for a hotel chain in Wales collapsed.

Bizarrely, I’m actually talking to the 47-year-old because his first UK stage tour, which plays Newcastle Theatre Royal next week, casts him as autistic savant Raymond Babbitt, who inherits a fortune in an adaptation of the popular movie Rain Man.

The actor who has made a fortune from becoming the voice of Bob the Builder, was last seen on TV in BBC1’s Waterloo Road.

Now you can’t quite help but assume that he took on the role of Raymond to ensure that he pays off his creditors as quickly as possible.

Morrissey says: “It’s going to take me about three years to get back on an even keel. With a company you would expect to take about three years to get into profit anyway, it’s just it involves me personally.

“It doesn’t really bother me. I’ve got an IVA (Individual Voluntary Arrangement which agrees to pay off a percentage of the debts) to pay people back as much as I possibly can.

“I could have hoodwinked everyone and just gone bankrupt, but I chose not to. I chose not to do what was done to me. The guy who I was working with just went bankrupt and left the joint debt on my plate and I decided to sort it out,”

says Morrissey who, despite his Men Behaving Badly image on TV, has actually been quite careful with his investments up to now.

“It’s disappointing more than anything and there were a number of individuals who lost a lot of money on the project and it took a lot of time to sink in that this wasn’t going to plan. If I dwell on this it makes me angry, but I’m a glass halffull rather than half-empty kind of person and I look to the future and see my way out of it.”

Although Morrissey is widely regarded as the landlord of the Ye Olde Punch Bowl Inn in Marton cum Grafton, North Yorkshire, which sells the successful Morrissey Fox Blonde Ale, he denies he is anything more than an ambassador for the business.

“I have never owned anything of the beer company and I’m working with them as an ambassador to build up a brand which rather like working with someone like Pedigree or Homebase they pay me a fee. It’s more than normal because it has my name, and I’m determined to make this a large international brand and that’s when I shall benefit. The company owns the Ye Olde Punch Bowl, but I did take out the lease on it. I’m quite happy to keep the beer in the eye of the public because me and Richard Fox designed it to our specific taste and there is now a Blonde and a Brunette ale that are available in Tesco, plus a thousand pubs across the country,” he explains.

His ambition is to eventually build a brewery, but that might take a few more years of acting to finance.

“I got offered a fantastic role and took the bull by the horns and I’m ‘rolling with it baby’ as it were,” says Morrissey who is only knocked out of his stride by the mention of Dustin Hoffman’s name in connection with playing the role of Raymond in the 1988 Oscar-winning movie.

“The big difference is that this was a movie. This is a stage production and the two disciplines are totally different. I’m able to do a larger performance because I’ve got to reach the back of the stalls and ‘the gods’. It’s not a ‘road movie’ it’s a destination play and we end up in the hotel room, but the story is the same so if you’re going to come and watch it then bring your tissues. It’s a very touching and moving story with plenty of pathos. And with pathos comes comedy,” he says.

The actor phoned co-star Charles Lawson about playing Raymond and was told “well, one of these days you had to put your head above the parapet”.

Morrissey went out and discovered as much as he could about the medical condition and found out that some people develop the condition as a result of a brain trauma.

“There was a guy in America who started after being hit on the side of the head by a baseball and developed all this cognitive powers concerning dates. Kim Peek (the original Rain Man) had suffered a number of fits and turns out to have eight hemispheres in the right side of his brain which means he can’t forget anything. He can read a page with each eye and if it takes you three minutes to read a page, he can read three pages in eight to ten seconds and have 98 per cent perfect recall.

They see the world differently to us and it takes a long time for them to come into step with what we regard as normal. If you say ‘take a seat over there’ they will physically pick up a chair and move it to where you pointed,” explains the actor who studied documentaries with the aim of developing his autistic character.

“Then you try and tie it to a script which isn’t about autism, so it’s not easy,” says Morrissey, who confesses that he’s only forgotten to pack one item so far during the tour.

His care with cash is shown by the fact that he’s using his eight-year-old BMW on tour and claims that the only risk-taking he normally takes behind the wheel involves racing cars on UK circuits.

“It’s all about hand to eye coordination and being brave or stupid, whichever you want to call it.

I’ve done a double-360 degree roll in a single-seater at about 140mph, but I was more scared on a rollercoaster because I’ve got no control over that,” he says.

Football fan Morrissey had few problems signing up for a TV series which will see him taking his new brand of beer to English World Cup supporters in South Africa next year.

“I’ve never been to a World Cup and I think if England can get to the quarter-finals they could go all the way. Let’s hope Brazil and Argentina mess up before then,” he says.

■ Rain Man, Newcastle Theatre Royal, Monday-Saturday. Tickets: £8.50-£29. Box Office: 08448-112-121 theatreroyal.co.uk