Ben Wishaw has a nose for the “beautiful young woman” in the period thriller Perfume. Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman co-star.

For a guy who carries a whole movie, Ben Wishaw is surprisingly slight and weedy-looking — in the best British tradition, of course.

The star of Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer was in Toronto recently to talk about the film, about the stray cats that take refuge in his London home, and about being an unknown on the big screen — and to talk about all those things in an utterly charming fashion.

Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer, which opens tomorrow and co-stars Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman, is the tale of an orphan in 18th century France. Wishaw stars as that orphan, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a young man with a very special gift: His extraordinary sense of smell. Grenouille is forced to work in a tannery and take in all manner of bad smells, but when he discovers the sublime delights of perfume, his life is changed.

And changed again when he decides to capture the essence of “beautiful young woman”, a scent he can bottle only through murder.

Wishaw, 26, may have played Hamlet twice on the stage by the time he was 16, but he’s still a relative newcomer to movies. He’s had parts in a handful of films, including The Trench, Enduring Love and Layer Cake, but the move to starring in Perfume was quite a transition.

“It has been a bit of a hectic three years,” says Wishaw of Perfume. “It’s only just hit me, how much of a whirlwind it’s been. But it’s been fantastic. It’s been challenging.”

Perfume is based on the best-selling novel by Patrick Suskind, “And the book is adored, particularly in Germany,” says Wishaw. “As we were starting, I got really sick, maybe the realization just sunk in that there were a lot of eyes looking at us, a lot of pressure. But after a while, you can’t be creative in that condition, so you just hold your head up and get used to it. The theatre helps you with that.”

The theatre is where he is already known.

Wishaw was born in Bedfordshire and began acting at Samuel Whitbread Community College.

He trained at RADA and made his West End debut in the stage adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials at the National Theatre. He then starred in Trevor Nunn’s Hamlet at the Old Vic.

On the movie front, he recently played Keith Richards in the film Stoned and filmed Pawel Pawlikowski’s up-coming Restraint Of Beasts.

And he’s one of seven actors playing Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There.

“I don’t play him — well, none of us plays Bob Dylan per se, we play elements of his personality,” says Wishaw.

“I’m a sort of hybrid, a cross of Dylan and Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet. It’s about his personality and how he’s managed to avoid being pigeonholed, how he’s reinvented himself, his shape-shifting.”

But back to Wishaw’s own shape-shifting (so to speak) in Perfume.

Did his director, Tom Tykwer, ask Wishaw to sniff the world differently to get into character as Grenouille?

“Tom never said you have to go out and smell a lot of things but I did try to think about it,” says Wishaw. “I did try to get into that frame of mind, checking out what was happening olfactorily around me. Olfactorily — I love saying that word.”

More Artists