"There were a chosen few, and I wasn't one of them. And that, he says, goes all the way back to his days at Central School Of Speech & Drama. "I was neither one thing or another." By which I think he means he was too handsome to play character roles and not pretty enough to be a romantic lead. "People never knew what to do with me," he says. Yet a feeling lingers that Sewell has not yet shown all he's capable of. He is currently on stage in Pinter's Old Times, and starring in film thriller All Things To All Men. The black curls have been cut short, and his cheekbones are sharper.
"If there was a list of people getting picked, I wasn't on it." He's 45 now. Casting agents, he says, "thought I was what I looked like, which was a curly-haired… whatever". For years, Sewell was rarely off horseback. He takes a gulp of his latte and cracks his knuckles, like one of the many villains he got stuck playing after 2001's A Knight's Tale. "I'd never have been anywhere near it were it not for my personal relationship with Tom Stoppard," he says (Stoppard adapted Ford Maddox Ford's books for the screen). His recent cameo as the demented Reverend Duchemin in BBC2's Parade's End is one such example. "If a film role is obviously great, then it's been difficult for me to get a look-in." Instead, he says, he has to "kind of trick my way into supporting roles". "For a long time, I've had to hustle," he admits. In fact, he's disarmingly honest about his stop-start career. If Sewell is bored of being asked why he isn't a bigger star, he's far too polite to say so. "Well, I have to think something, don't I?" "Yes, years of compromise and disappointment have added depth to my acting." He lets out a big laugh. So I've been close lots of times, but I think it's been the making of me as an actor." He pauses. I was in Shakespeare In Love with Julia Roberts, until that fell apart. I was in The Wings Of The Dove with Uma Thurman, until that got cancelled. I was the lead in Interview With The Vampire, until Tom Cruise decided he was interested. "People talk about opportunity knocking," he says, "but the gate was always swinging in the breeze before I got to the door. Before his 30th birthday, he had starred in two hugely successful TV adaptations, of Middlemarch and Cold Comfort Farm, and taken a lead role in the original production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, alongside Felicity Kendal and Bill Nighy. T here was a moment in the mid-1990s when Rufus Sewell's international stardom was assured.