Grace and favour

12:16pm Saturday 24th March 2007

Ioan Gruffudd talks to Steve Pratt about his "amazing experience" of playing William Wilberforce, the MP who led the movement to abolish the slave trade.

Ioan Gruffudd is talking politics. He has no choice as the character he plays in his latest film was one of the key political figures in the slavery abolition movement 200 years ago. As proof of his versatility, the Welsh-born actor has switched from being Mr Fantastic, the man with the extra-stretchy skin in the Fantastic Four movies, to Yorkshire MP William Wilberforce, a leading campaigner in the fight to abolish the slave trade.

He plays him in Amazing Grace, which follows Wilberforce's career through his twenties and thirties as he leads the political campaign against slavery. The actor himself was at the Houses of Parliament this week, not to speak, but to attend a screening of the film for MPs.

Gruffudd was tying up the loose ends of his life before moving to America when the screenplay came through his letterbox. "I fell in love with the script. I was immensely moved and entertained by it," he recalls.

"I was so moved by it, and had to go and pursue playing the part and, of course, subsequently was educated by it because I was ignorant of Wilberforce and his achievements. So it's been an amazing experience all round."

Later in the conversation, he says that making Amazing Grace was incredibly satisfying, going as far as to say it was the most satisfying experience of his career to date. Coming from most other actors this would seem precious, but Gruffudd sounds like he means it. He's what your grannie would call a very nice boy - always polite, always pleasant. He even wears a suit and tie for interviews when many other young actors turn up looking like they've just got out of, or not been to, bed.

He couldn't help thinking about his own life while playing a man who entered politics at the age of 21 and was best buddy with William Pitt the Younger, who became Prime Minster at 24. "It's sort of humbling when you read that. At that age I was worrying about my diction, my received pronunciation, and wondering about being a tree at drama college," he says.

"These guys wanted to change the world and wanted to do it at a very young age. Their youthful belief played a great part in that.

"They were incredibly brave, basically asking the government to put an end to their economy. Britain was built on the back of the slave trade and they asked them to bring the country to its knees. It's like asking us to stop our dependence on foreign oil or the budget for defence. It's that extreme."

Filming Amazing Grace gave him the chance to share screen time with such acting greats as Albert Finney and Michael Gambon. The prospect terrified and excited him at the same time, he says. "I've been an actor since I was 12 and it was a dream of mine to be involved in a film like this and to work with these great people."

It wasn't so much great actors that made him want to act as the whole acting process. He was smitten with it after appearing in a Welsh language soap opera. "That was it, I just wanted to do it for the rest of my life," he says.

His biggest influences are old-time film stars like Cary Grant, James Stewart and Gregory Peck, as well as contemporaries like Leonardo DiCaprio ("I worked with him on Titanic and was blown away by him"). To that list I suspect he'd now add Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Wilberforce's friend William Pitt in Amazing Grace. "He's a tremendous actor, he's breathtaking actually and quite fun to be around," says Gruffudd, who adds that the reason their friendship comes across so strongly on screen is because they got along so well off screen.

"We bonded playing ten-pin bowling. Because, more often than not, we were living in Holiday Inns on some back-of-beyond industrial site where there was only a cineplex and bowling alley."

Finding fame on TV as Hornblower, Gruffudd followed with other small screen roles in The Forsyte Saga, Man And Boy, and Great Expectations before the movies came calling. 102 Dalmatians not only gave him the lead in a US-backed movie but introduced him to his fiancee Alice Evans.

They plan to marry later this year, probably in the US "to celebrate our new life - and probably a bit more chance of a sunny day". As the weather outside in London has changed from sunny to rain to snow and back to sunny during the course of his sentence, his remarks about the climate are understandable.

But he wasn't worried about bad weather for the London premiere of Amazing Grace earlier this week. "I remember on Fantastic Four we had a premiere in New York on Liberty Island and had to take a ferry over there. We were delayed for two hours because a storm came in and had to stop halfway through because water had got into the projector," he recalls.

"Then, doing the Press junket in London, we had a glorious day, then got in the cars, went down to Leicester Square for the premiere and it just chucked it down. So I think this snow and rain is a good omen for the film."

Since Cardiff-born Gruffudd quit this country for the US, he's been away from his new home more than he's been there. "You just chase the work," he says. "I've spent 12 months in Canada on the two Fantastic Four films, five months in Ireland on King Arthur and 12 weeks here doing Amazing Grace. But America is my base, you have to go where the work is."

He had no worries doing a small British picture like Amazing Grace, whose $28m budget probably wouldn't pay for the sandwiches on a film like Fantastic Four. Besides he was "treated like a star and had all the necessities to make my life comfortable while I was here," he says.

"It's a much more satisfying experience working on Amazing Grace on a daily basis because it's script-based, character-based. Fantastic Four is very technical and, over a long period of time, very repetitive and tedious, to be honest. It's about hitting the mark and saying a few cool lines in an American accent. Imagining your arm is stretched over there to that wall and that people are flying around. The skill of that is the discipline of being in the moment and believing everything you're doing."

He doesn't forget that being in a big commercial hit like Fantastic Four can help smaller, potentially less commercial projects like Amazing Grace. When the film was released in the the US, he told the distributors he was keen to go out and promote the picture.

"I said I would go anywhere because I knew I could help. In Liverpool last week we had a busload of kids come to watch the film because they're studying it. They watched it in raptures but I signed autographs and they took pictures beforehand.

"But you can't go wrong with a film that's a good film and a story that's a good story."

Amazing Grace (PG) is now showing in cinemas.