When Greg Wise first appears in his latest film, sunny 80s jukebox musical Walking on Sunshine, two things immediately tip off the audience that his character may be bad news. For a start, he's played by Greg Wise, who's pretty much built an acting career on playing rogues and scoundrels, ever since his breakthrough as cad Willoughby in 1995's Sense and Sensibility. The second reason we're suspicious of Doug is because he has one of those nasty little triangular moustache-free goatees, sometimes known as a soul patch or, as Wise helpfully informs me, a "flavour saver" or a "juice catcher".
"I wanted to allow the audience only 1.2 seconds before they decided the character is a twat," he explains. "It was just a way of trying to work out how to show this man is a narcissist before he opens his mouth."
Is the real Greg Wise a narcissist? It didn't seem that way, based on an hour's lunch. Of course, you have to accept that anyone who goes into acting or performing – or making art in general or writing journalism for that matter – has a touch more narcissism than average. But out of all the actors I've met over the years, Wise struck me as one of the least narcissistic. Not that he's self-effacing either. There's definitely a bit of showmanship in the way he stretches out his big arms when he gestures. But he seems supremely at ease in his own tanned skin, and as happy to talk about his earlier films as the ones he's promoting – as well as parenting, architecture, gardening, the writings of John Ruskin, multiple universes and bio-fuel made from human excrement.
At one point, we get on to work-life balance and he points to the tangibles of being a dad and being connected to his family as keys to finding that inner harmony. Jeez, you're so healthy, I remark. "A lot of fucking therapy, mate," he laughs back.
You have to wonder where he found the time to see a shrink, given he seems so peripatetically busy doing so many things with his life, including raising his 14-year-old daughter Gaia and adopted son Tindy (now 27) with his wife Emma Thompson, building projects at home (he trained as an architect), producing and directing his own films, and raising awareness about the aforementioned bio-fuels. Perhaps it helps that he hasn't worked all that much as an actor – his filmography isn't especially long and there are big gaps of more than a year or two between gigs. He was at the centre of a tremendous amount of attention when he got together with Thompson back in the mid-90s after they met on the set of Sense and Sensibility, particularly as she was his elder by a not-so-staggering seven years.
After that, things went a bit quiet on the acting front apart from some supporting roles in TV series such as Cranford and Horatio Hornblower, plus non-leads in some good films (A Cock and Bull Story) and better parts in worse ones (Mad Cows).
At one point, during our discussion of multiple universes – itself prompted by a discussion of regrets and how few he has – Wise says: "I'd like to witness the parallel world where I didn't sit in the office of the head of Sony in the mid-90s and say I didn't want to work in America and see what would have happened. I'd probably be dead by now."
He doesn't elaborate on why he might be dead if he'd taken the chance to work in the US, and the line of thought is broken by a waiter clearing away the remains of our salads. However, judging by the rest of our talk there's the sense that maybe that hunger for stimulation, that superabundance of nervous energy, might be his one weak spot, the edginess that makes him good at playing slightly menacing characters like the ones in Walking on Sunshine and upcoming horror film Blackwood.
But for now, Wise seems to be in a happy place and evidently enjoyed making those last two immensely. The former gives him a chance to show off his vocal skills in two numbers: that karaoke classic Don't You Want Me, Baby? and a duet version of George Michael's Faith, sneakily rejigged to fit a seduction scene he plays with newcomer Annabel Scholey.
Reading on mobile? Watch the trailer for Walking on Sunshine here
Was it scary singing on screen for the first time? Wise shrugs. "I was a chorister as a kid and sang solos in York Minster and all that," he explains. "My voice broke right in the middle of a school production of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. In the middle of the first song. I was playing Phoebe, the lead girl in The Yeomen of the Guard, in a dress, playing opposite my geography teacher. I've always sung and played the guitar and played in bands. This is ultimately utterly exposing because you can't hide."
But they can Auto-Tune your voice, I suggest. "For sure, and they can cut very nicely around you dancing like a rugby player, but I really wanted to do it as properly as I could do. No one in the cast apart from Leona Lewis was a professional singer, so we were all out of our comfort zone. Annabel has been a professional dancer, but none of the rest of us could dance. They were sweet about letting me offer up suggestions about how to keep the story moving, because so often in a musical everything stops for the song. With Don't You Want Me, Baby it was easy because it's a narrative song, but with Faith we were sweating over how to make each line work. It ain't opera, though."
Sunshine was shot in Italy's Puglia region, and everyone looks to be having a blast. "But the risk with something like that is that you can use up all of the fun making it and there's none left over for people watching," Wise says. "I've not seen the definitive cut of the film yet, but based on what I saw … well, it is what it is, and that's great. Energetic, joyful, loud, silly, bright, fun." The premiere was last week, the day after our interview, and Wise was excited to be taking his wife and daughter, especially since Gaia had never seen one of his films.
He's perhaps less likely to show her Blackwood, not because it isn't a perfectly solid low-budget thriller, but because his character (another shady one) takes a particularly nasty, unexpected turn. Nevertheless, ever cheery, Wise says he enjoyed making that, too, even if he did end up losing money on it.
"I think I was mainly hired because I was the only one who knew how to light a fire," he says. "I was going to have to spend four hours a day in a car to get to the location [a spectacular Voysey house in Guildford], so I booked a room in a local pub instead for the shoot. The cost of the room and a beer and a plate of fish and chips was more than I was paid each day, but there was a glorious let's-do-the-play-right-here feel to it all."
Wise has one more project in the offing. Effie Gray is a period piece written by Thompson (who has a supporting role as well), in which Wise plays the 19th-century critic and reformer John Ruskin, opposite Dakota Fanning as his young wife, the title character. Ruskin, with his high ideals and exquisite sensibilities, couldn't be further from the usual cads Wise plays – that you can read Wise's CV as a roll call of cads is as much accident as design. The movie was shot a couple of years ago, but has been embroiled in a legal dispute over plagiarism that's finally been resolved, in Thompson and the film-makers' favour.
Today, Wise is disinclined to discuss the case, but clearly chomping at the bit in anticipation of the film. Legend has it that Ruskin's marriage to Effie was never consummated because he was so shocked by the sight of her pubic hair on his wedding night – a story many biographers now dispute as a distortion.
"Ruskin had no relationship with the emotional world at all, and that's what the wedding night was about," says Wise. "I think he was possibly on the autistic spectrum, and you see that in his drawing, the way that every leaf on a tree would be done precisely. He had to measure everything in his world, and until he measured and drew it he couldn't understand it, and something as profound and exposing as his wedding night just tipped him."
For all the apparent casting against type, there is an echo of Ruskin's fascination with structure and precision in Wise's own preoccupation with what he calls process. "All I have as an actor is process, because once I'm finished it has nothing to do with me at all," he says. "That's the same with living, painting, everything. It's about the doing of it. Put it in a drawer, give it away."
He's turned his attention behind the camera lately, as a producer (he executive produced BBC drama The Song of Lunch, starring Thompson and Alan Rickman), and as a director. Over coffee, he tells me about A Good Man… Is Hard to Find, a documentary he made about Jack Good, the TV producer who brought rock'n'roll to the UK via the 1950s variety shows Six-Five Special and Oh Boy! Wise's first paid gig as an actor was playing Good on stage in Liverpool.
The photographer is ready for him in the alley behind the hotel where we've had lunch, and while we're waiting for the bill I tell him that I've failed to find a DVD of it anywhere. He promises that if I give him my address he'll send me a copy, and as I hand over my business card I think: yeah, sure right. I bet he'll forget by the time he does the next interview.
We wrap with a discussion of what lies ahead. Well, he's very busy, thank you very much. More building projects for his sister and friends, harvesting his courgettes, trying to persuade his daughter to go to art school first before she tries going into acting, and a few projects for television of his own he's developing with his writing partner John Henderson. "We've done four different pieces, all different, all busily being rejected now as we speak," he smiles. "Which is fine because you keep them in a drawer and the people who reject them eventually get fired."
Five days later, I get a notice from the post office telling me I have a letter I can collect if I pay the outstanding postage. Inside is a disc of A Good Man… Is Hard to Find with a note from Wise. It's a delightful film about a larger-than-life character who could never stick to doing just one thing, who became, after the TV work, a theatre impresario (he made a rock version of Othello starring Jerry Lee Lewis as Iago) and later a religious hermit who painted icons. I can see why Wise would like him.
