Bond villain Toby Stephens on the perils of being posh on TV

Toby Stephens talks to Tom Leonard of The Telegraph about Hollywood, booze and the unspoken class bias in television drama.

As the son of two of this country's finest actors, Toby Stephens would understandably prefer to be recognised in his own right. I'd be happy to oblige, but as we queue for the lift at ITV's South Bank studios, I fail to connect the scruffy figure in the wonderfully actorish ensemble of knee-length red corduroy coat, scarf, narrow jeans and trainers with Gustav Graves, the epee-wielding, electronic-armour-wearing master villain in the most recent James Bond film.

But then I get a good look at his face. Those finely cut features are framed by long red sideburns - serious, costume-drama sideburns.

Touché! Stephens, son of Dame Maggie Smith and the late Sir Robert Stephens, has indulged his facial hair to play Rochester in a forthcoming BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre. But we are meeting to talk about an even more melodramatic piece of television, a two-part ITV drama, The Best Man. As best man to Michael (Richard Coyle), he is a toffee-nosed public school cad, who drives a sports car, sneers a lot, despises women and does unspeakable things to a cat while talking to its owner down the phone.

Public schoolboys may be making a comeback in the House of Commons, but on prime-time television drama, it's business as usual: they're either clowns or villains, or both. Stephens finds it very tiresome.

"To be taken seriously at the moment, you have to be working class or have a working-class accent; otherwise, you are seen as a caricature," he says. "This country's still class-obsessed. Actors are defined by the way they speak, and I find that quite depressing."

His mother might have a reputation for public aloofness (her younger son says she simply no longer needs to bother much about publicity), but Stephens is disarmingly open, happy to talk with far more candour than most actors about his professional and personal setbacks - his problems with Hollywood, with alcohol and with being posh in a plebby world.

The irony, he says, is that he's not really posh. "My mum was born in Ilford, my dad was a labourer's son from Bristol. Because they were desperately trying to escape that working-class or lower middle-class bracket, they were told to speak in a certain way. And that informed how I was brought up."

Stephens, who was raised by his mother and stepfather, the late playwright Beverley Cross, had a very unshowbizzy "hermetic and simple" upbringing, first in Canada and later in West Sussex. He was educated at a relatively unknown public school, Seaford College. He was never academic and wanted to act from the age of 14, but his mother was brutally realistic about the hardships. Even today, Dame Maggie is obviously interested in what he and his brother (Chris Larkin, another actor) is doing, but they "don't sit around talking shop all the time".

While he admits that his upper-class image works both ways - helping with roles like Mr Rochester - the class thing rankles. Particularly, he says, when he sees actors who went to far smarter schools than Seaford pretend they're working-class.

"I'm not willing to pretend to be anything other than I am. You get a lot of people who went to Eton, Winchester or Harrow and they're suddenly talking mockney. That's great - they made a deliberate decision. But while I can do it for a part, I don't want to go round pretending to be what I'm not." So who does do that? "I'm not going to name names."

Anyway, it's "too late" for him to change, he adds. Too late? He's only 36.

After drama school (Lamda) and getting his first break while working as a stagehand in Chichester, he went to try his luck in America when he was 29. Again, he was "too late" - arriving on the British film scene just as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels swept away the Merchant Ivory brigade and ushered in a new era of geezers and over-boiled Cockney accents. "There was this backlash and you can understand why it happened. It just meant that I was out of a job really," he says.

He stayed in America for a couple of years, during which time he met his wife, Anna-Louise Plowman, a New Zealand-born actress. "It was good going there because it made me realise I didn't want to do the American thing. I could have completely reinvented myself, but it takes commitment. You have to move to LA for at least three years. I just got very homesick after a while. People become lost out there and lose any sense of who they are. I'm very British and I love working here."

And, of course, they already had Hugh Grant. "A lot of British actors went out and were told that they were 'sort of like Hugh Grant', which was incredibly depressing. I was like 'f--- that!' Also, I think they discovered that Australians are far closer to them, that they can graft them on to an American lifestyle far easier than they can with us."

He has, at least, appeared as a Bond baddie in Die Another Day, the most recent and easily the most ludicrous of the series. Stephens - as a surgically altered North Korean megalomaniac - was probably the best thing in it. "I remember going for the initial interview with Barbara Broccoli [the producer] and Lee Tamahori [the director] when they told me about the character. Lee said, 'You're a Korean who's been genetically grafted into being a Caucasian.' I thought this was the most absurd thing I'd ever heard. I walked out thinking I'd never hear anything more about it."

Still, making it was a "schoolboy fantasy". The Bond producers have gone "completely the right route" in recruiting Daniel Craig as the new 007, he adds. Pierce Brosnan has the right face and is "brilliant at the action sequences", but Craig is a "much darker, more interesting actor". Stephens says he would love to do another big movie - he could do with the money - but points out that, in the case of Bond they are not as career-making as one might expect. "The franchise is always so much bigger than the actors in it. You can end up playing villains for the rest of your life, which is not something I'm interested in doing."

Unfortunately for him, he possesses one of the best sneers in the business. Even when he's smiling, it looks like a sneer. "It's something that happens with my face," he says, insisting that he often doesn't realise he's doing it.

Toby saw little of his father, a notorious alcoholic, when he was young, but still managed to inherit his drink problem. It started at drama school, he says, and was fuelled by the usual thespian contributory factors. "There's all that dead time when you're not working and it can be very destructive because it can affect your self-confidence. You're constantly told you're not right for something - you've got red hair, you've got freckles, you're too old, you're not cockney enough. You've got nothing to do but sit around and mull over these things, and people end up drinking as a way of dealing with it."

He hasn't drunk for eight years. "My terrible fear was I'd seen what it had done to him [Robert] and I knew that if I didn't stop, I would go exactly the same way. I stopped before I reached rock bottom."

Diana Rigg might say he reached rock bottom when he almost missed a West End matinee performance with her because he was still at home sleeping off a late night as the curtain was about to go up. "Quite rightly, she was furious with me and I had to go crawling into her dressing room with flowers."

Apart from the great drinker gene, his DNA must surely contain the makings of a great actor too. Sadly and surely prematurely - because Stephens is a much better actor than his CV would suggest - he seems to have made up his mind that he will never be as good as his mother.

He remembers as a boy being acutely embarrassed at seeing his mother acting, but later realised "how extraordinary her ability was". He smiles ruefully - it's definitely not a sneer. "I'm deeply envious of that because it's certainly not something I possess."

'The Best Man' is on ITV1 on Monday at 9pm.

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