Hot Property

You've got to admire an actor so careless of his public reputation that he will go on the record with a passionate defence of Gilbert O'Sullivan. What's even more remarkable about James Nesbitt is that he can deliver a word-perfect rendition of O'Sullivan's 1970 hit "Nothing Rhymed" so convincingly that even the cynical hack opposite him is forced to conclude that his childhood dismissal of the singer, his silly flat cap and his even sillier name may have been a trifle hasty. Granted, Nesbitt - who describes himself as "a magnificent drinker: I've got a bizarre stamina" - was on the outside of five sea breezes and two Irish coffees by the time he gave his recital. But I was stone-cold sober, in anticipation of a long drive home, and he still sounded pretty good to me.

You've got to admire an actor so careless of his public reputation that he will go on the record with a passionate defence of Gilbert O'Sullivan. What's even more remarkable about James Nesbitt is that he can deliver a word-perfect rendition of O'Sullivan's 1970 hit "Nothing Rhymed" so convincingly that even the cynical hack opposite him is forced to conclude that his childhood dismissal of the singer, his silly flat cap and his even sillier name may have been a trifle hasty. Granted, Nesbitt - who describes himself as "a magnificent drinker: I've got a bizarre stamina" - was on the outside of five sea breezes and two Irish coffees by the time he gave his recital. But I was stone-cold sober, in anticipation of a long drive home, and he still sounded pretty good to me.

Maybe gratitude had dulled my critical faculties. I'd come off the substitutes' bench at a couple of hours' notice to do the interview. Which was fine, except that I'm not a great watcher of Cold Feet, the hugely successful ITV series in which he plays the fecklessly laddish but "Oirishly" charming Adam Williams. Recently rechristened Gold Feet after tabloid reports of the high salaries of its stars (£20,000 per episode, according to The Sun), Cold Feet has made Nesbitt into one of the hottest properties of the moment. But as I also couldn't remember much about his roles in films such as Hear My Song and Waking Ned, I really had no idea what I was going to find, still less what we were going to talk about. So the discovery that Nesbitt is a quick-witted, defiantly opinionated 35-year-old for whom a love of conversation and alcohol is in no way inhibited by the presence of a reporter's tape-recorder, came as a delightful surprise.

Nesbitt has evidently had a fair amount of practice in standing up for his record collection. "ELO, I loved them!" he declares at one point, heedless of the effect such aesthetic apostasy might have on the other drinkers at the Groucho Club. "When I met my wife, Sonia, she was, you know, so-o-o into The Clash. To this day, 11 years later, I slightly resent the fact that she thinks that my musical taste was appalling. It's impossible for me to have an argument with her, but I will go, 'Hold on, Elton John's early albums were fan-tastic'."

Mention of the spendthrift knight sends Nesbitt rocking off on a tangent. "I did a film last year which Elton John's boyfriend David Furnish produced, called Women Talking Dirty. David is great and I said to him one day, 'So, does Elton ever sing to you?'. And he went, 'No, no way.' So I said, 'Come on, he must.' And he said, 'Well, I guess some days he might sing, It's a little bit funny, this feeling inside...' I love the idea of waking up with Elton John, and Elton singing one of his songs to you."

The first record Nesbitt ever bought, at the age of 11, was "Don't Give Up On Us Baby", by David Soul. "I loved Starsky & Hutch, and my aunt Edith had bought me a Starsky cardigan and I was in love with that, too," Nesbitt explains. "I bought the single the day after I had fallen off my Coyote skateboard for the first time and ripped the cardigan. I felt so guilty about letting down Starsky that I went out and bought Hutch's song.

"I grew up singing in festivals and stuff. And I also grew up watching three older sisters who were into naff music. It's not a big step going from Irish ballads to schmoozy ballads..."

Which leads us to the nub of the matter. Because if you are, like Jimmy Nesbitt, an Ulster Presbyterian, with a fierce, wounded pride in your cultural identity, the prospect of defending a bunch of naff musicians is nothing compared to the battle to defend your very self. "I did a play in New Haven, Connecticut a few years ago," he explains, "and by week six I was almost hitting people. They'd come to see the play and then talk to me afterwards and they'd say, 'I'm Irish', and I'd say, 'No you're not'. They'd never been to Ireland. When you asked them where their people came from, they'd say, 'Er ... Killken ... Killarn ... Kill-something'.

"Well, sod off. I'd rather have my Irish roots than those idiots' ones. It's like when I first went to the Central School of Speech and Drama. I either had the whole of London thinking I was a Paddy, or I had drama-school students going, 'God, yeah, Brits out', and I'd be going, 'Well...'. The Northern Ireland Protestant has a bizarre and lonely life. Everyone goes on about Catholic guilt. In Northern Ireland, it's a very different thing. In Northern Ireland, the Protestant guilt is much, much worse. They're the loneliest race in the world, the Northern Ireland Protestants.

"You feel lost and misrepresented. Because all you can say is, I didn't ask to be part of the United Kingdom, but I grew up here. I played in marching bands and I would still play in them. My father was a member of the Ballymena Young Conquerors, average age about 70, who weren't a 'Kick the Pope' band, they were a concert flute band. That's my culture. My culture is the Lambeg drum and I would never ever want to divorce myself from it."

The Lambeg is the drum of the Orange Order, first brought to Ireland - so legend has it - by Duke Schomberg, William of Orange's second-in-command. But Nesbitt's personal allegiances are less obvious than that might suggest. He considers himself a Protestant Irishman, and the simplest way of explaining what that means is by reference to another of his great passions - namely, sport.

He was a useful schoolboy rugby player, and he still plays football. His lifelong hero is, as he calls him, Geordie Best, and he was supporting Manchester United long before that affiliation became a cliché. So, here's how his hierarchy of support works out in terms of national sides: "If Northern Ireland play Ireland, I support Northern Ireland. If Ireland play England, I support Ireland. But if England play Germany, then it's England. Because I support an English club."

Nesbitt spent the first years of his life in Broughshane, County Antrim - "the heartland of Ian Paisley country" - where his father was a primary-school headmaster. "He was an extraordinary teacher, an extraordinary man. The only other pupils at our school were farmers' children. But they were farmers whose children, at the age of five, were starting to learn the recorder, and by eight were travelling round Ireland playing Bach preludes on the instrument.

"My father was strict. He may have had what in Islington would be considered bad parenting ideas. He didn't necessarily want to be your friend - I always knew that he was my father. But I think that when you're a kid, you don't want your dad to be your mate. Otherwise, what do you rebel against? But as an educator, if the sun shone some days, he would say, 'We'll not go to school. We'll go outside'. If it was raining, he'd stay inside and read Dickens to us all day."

It was his father who started Nesbitt off as an actor, dragging him to auditions for a production of Oliver! in Coleraine, where the family had moved when James was 11. He got the part of the Artful Dodger and hasn't looked back since. Except, that is, to wonder whether he shouldn't have become a teacher, like all three of his sisters.

"To tell you the truth, it's something you come to terms with slowly. It doesn't matter how much success I get as an actor, I just feel that I wouldn't mind letting my dad see me teach, even if it was just for one day. I went to see the youngest of my three sisters teach in Hong Kong, and I was so immensely proud of her. She'd taken from my father all the things I wasn't able to take.

"An awful lot of it is to do with that Presbyterian thing of not being able to bear the thought of being an actor, not being able to enjoy it. It's like Geordie Best: it's no mistake that he's a Protestant, or that Alex Higgins is a Protestant. Van Morrison wouldn't exist if he was a Catholic. You can't be that bitter about your own talent and be a Catholic. I mean, look at all the Catholic stars. Fame sits well on Liam Neeson. Fame doesn't sit well on Protestants."

So we talk about something else instead, like children - Nesbitt has a two-year-old daughter called Peggy whom he loves with a passion. She returns the compliment by calling him "a silly old wanker", since she's heard him call so many other people that and assumes it's just what you do.

Much gooey, paternal swapping of kids' tales later, we move onto another obsession of the early-middle-aged male: hair-loss. "It's a great sign of mortality, the old hair," says Nesbitt, who is appalled by his rate of recession. "It's going, it's going... My dad has a thick head of hair, which is very irritating. It's not fair! I use this stuff now that a French laboratory has produced for people with money: you spray it on. And I take vitamins. It's a terrible obsession."

The hair thing is so tragic that it makes a return to the subject of Northern Ireland seem upbeat. Over the next few weeks, Cold Feet takes Nesbitt back to his roots as his character, Adam, goes to Ulster for his stag party. "It's where Adam Williams and James Nesbitt become tremendously similar," he says. "They were going to shoot it in Dublin, but I said no, screw that, Dublin's been done. So we went to Belfast instead."

The stag-night episode is marked by one of the outbursts of singing that have punctuated Nesbitt's Cold Feet role since the first episode when he serenaded his girlfriend Rachel, played by Helen Baxendale, stark naked, with a rose clenched between his buttocks. "My real vocation was to have been born in a different time, wearing a suit and crooning. I bitterly regret that I was never given the chance to do it." And with that, he launches into Gilbert O'Sullivan.

'Cold Feet' continues on Sundays at 9pm on ITV

Interesting? Click here to explore further