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Hugh Dancy is the actor who managed to bring grace and gravitas to his roles in Evening, The Jane Austen Book Club and even Confessions of a Shopaholic.
Dancy, 34, is currently starring in Adam, a relationship story with a bit of a wrinkle -- his character has Asberger's Syndrome, a condition marked by social awkwardness and communication difficulties. Dancy stars opposite Rose Byrne.
It was, he concedes, a challenging role.
"I suppose you could argue that the process of learning about something is precisely the process of learning about what its challenges are. And coming to understand them," Dancy says.
A lot of people ask him about Asberger's now.
"And understandably so. It's fascinating," he says. "People really are very interested in the work that actors do to portray somebody who's very different from themselves, and I'm still fascinated by it myself. But it's funny, I don't think it defines the actual movie. It's a much more accessible and universal story."
Between the script -- by director Max Mayer -- and Dancy's work, Adam is quite different from other, similar movies. Different in a good way.
"The real kiss of death in something like this is to see somebody acting," Dancy says. "Either you just don't do a good enough job of moving away from yourself, or you get caught up in the idea that you can show what you've got, and over-egg the pudding. And I was keen not to do that."
He succeeded.
Dancy is the son of leading British moral philosopher Jonathan Dancy and publisher Sarah Dancy. He attended St. Peter's College at Oxford. When he was younger, at boarding school, he was sent to study drama as a form of discipline for misbehaving. What began as something to keep him out of trouble ended up becoming his profession.
He says of that beginning, "There was no 'Eureka!' moment. I started acting at school when I was about 13, 14, and I suppose when people leave school at 18 they're thinking about their potential careers. When my friends started thinking about that, I realized I'd already made up my mind about it. But I don't know when that happened. It happened while I was looking in the other direction, you know?"
He adds, "But I knew I wanted to go to college, so at least I had a few years before it finally kicked in."
It kicked in with a performance in Twelfth Night when Dancy was 18. His early roles were on the small screen, with appearances in such TV series as Dangerfield and Cold Feet. Dancy was in David Copperfield, Daniel Deronda and Madame Bovary on television, and appeared in the feature film Black Hawk Down in 2001. His films include Ella Enchanted, King Arthur, Blood and Chocolate and Savage Grace, among others.
He worked with Claire Danes on the film Evening a few years ago, and they are now a romantic couple; they are to be married in September. The wedding is something Dancy politely declines to talk about, and he jokes, "I'm going to come riding down a beach on a white stallion with bare feet," to close the subject.
Dancy does his best to downplay all the fanfare that has sprung up around him, ignoring the "new Hugh Grant" labels, and all that. He has said that he chose to star in Adam as a way to control his career, "Without giving in to the expectations other people may have."