Even my lesbian friends think Dominic West is hot. Maybe it’s because there is something about him that is so purely, ridiculously Male, charming yet flawed. They love him in ‘The Affair,’ the series for which he was Golden Globe nominated. 

He plays Noah Solomon, a teacher and failing novelist. His wife is hugely rich and his father-in-law a hugely successful writer. Classic. He’s undermined, therefore available. The series is dark and gripping, told in separate episodes from the man’s point of view and then the woman’s. There’s lots of sex in it and it’s quite odd to be going to meet somebody who you’ve last seen on screen in just their boxers. 

I’m going to meet him at his house in Shepherd’s Bush, London. When I arrive only his wife and youngest daughter are in. He hasn’t told her about the interview. She gets on with making her daughter breakfast, unphased by the stranger in her kitchen. Catherine Fitzgerald seems unflappable, capable. It’s not long before he arrives and he’s instantly attentive and makes me coffee. A very good cup of coffee. He did it nonchalantly, like he didn’t care about making me the best cup of coffee, but he did it anyway. 

He’s just come back from the school run dropping off his three children. Only the 2 year old, Christabel is on her mother’s hip.

You can’t see where the charm ends and the bad boy begins or perhaps he is just very good at playing bad boys or at least men who are flawed.

His wife Catherine you can tell instantly suffers no fools. She’s busy getting things done, looking after 4 children and running her landscape gardening business.  Their garden is beautiful, it manages to look wild yet perfectly manicured, a riot of happy colours and an oasis of calm. 

I’m not sure why actors invite journalists into their homes. It seems to be asking for trouble. Who doesn’t want to know what their bathroom’s like, what books they read, if they’re tidy or chaotic. We’re in the garden because the garden is remarkable. The house inside looks like a busy family home, a big wooden table in the kitchen, it’s lived in, not self-conscious. It’s his work that’s been extraordinary. 

His Richard Burton in Burton and Taylor was magnetic, as the alcoholic Detective Jimmy McNulty in ‘The Wire’ he was sensational. In his latest film the animated ‘Finding Dory,’ he’s reunited with his Wire colleague Idris Elba. They play lazy, bad boy sea lions with English accents, their scenes together are the funniest in the movie. How lovely to see British humour in the midst of PC-PG Disney. 

‘Finding Dory,’ the sequel to Finding Nemo. Dory, played by Ellen DeGeneres, is the fish with short term memory loss. “Anyone who’s got kids must have watched ‘Finding Nemo’ 50 times. Idris Elba and I played two British sea lions who like to sit on a rock and carp on about things. We live in Ocean World, somewhere in the West Coast of America, we get fed sprats every day. It was great being fed Sprats and being with Idris. We had very few scenes together in ‘The Wire,’ he was my antagonist, so it was only in his last season that I was observing him, surveilling him that we got to hang out. It was very nice we got to reunite.” he says smiling and for a minute looking like his smug, lazy sea lion character. 

He’s looking very whiskery today. A dark beard seems to scribble out his distinctive features. I feel it’s even etched out his trademark wicked grin.

He’s often summoned to play really dark characters,  he was Fred West in ‘Appropriate Adult’. Even the real Fred West’s daughter thought the likeness was uncanny and he captured a spirit of evil. His wife was revolted by it. His sisters freaked out that people would think they were related to Fred West because they shared the same surname.  More recently he was super creepy Walt Camby, the greedy gazillionaire banker in ‘Money Monster’ with George Clooney and Julia Roberts. How is it that he does evil so well? 

“Errrr don’t know, just got an evil face” he smiles sweetly. He’s charming, that’s for sure, but he’s not in the least bit flirty. I thought he loved all women and flirted with all of them. I blame the beard. It’s an instant barrier. In a recent interview he said, “I think women should be more indulgent of affairs, I really do. It’s daft to kick someone out over a fling. Isn’t it? Everyone should turn a blind eye to men’s behaviour between the ages of 40 and 50. Let it all blow over.” 

He doesn’t want to elaborate on that today. He look a little embarrassed. Maybe because we’re in the family home. Maybe that’s why we’re here. So he can guard his own mouth. The Dominic West who shouts his mouth off and says the first thing that comes into his head is not around today. 

He was born 46 years ago in Sheffield, the sixth of seven children. His Irish father owned a plastics factory that did rather well. Being the sixth of seven perhaps made him feel anonymous, like he had to try harder to be centre stage, perhaps that’s why he became an actor. He has four children with Catherine, Dora, nine and Christabelle two and sons, Senan, seven, Francis, six and a daughter, Martha, who’s now 17, from a previous relationship with the aristocrat Polly Astor (granddaughter of Nancy).

He’s got five sisters and he thinks that this knowledge and being surrounded by so many females makes him somewhat of a feminist.

Much has been made of the fact that he went to Eton. He’s a couple of years older than Damien Lewis, you begin to wonder if Eton had a really great Drama department. Did he feel that he was a bit of an outsider as everyone else was so posh? 

“No, it wasn’t like that at all, it’s such a big school. And a great school actually. It helps you find what you’re good at and once you’ve found it, life becomes easier and I found acting almost immediately. Damien Lewis was a few years below me, so I didn’t know him at school, he was a very good footballer, I wasn’t but I was quite good at Rugby and when I was cast as Hamlet aged 16 the director said I had to choose between the two, no more Rugby.”

Was that because he didn’t want Hamlet on crutches? “Yes, and also the training took rehearsal time.” He wasn’t homesick at all? ” Yes, very much so for the first year but acting saved me, I became known for it and respected for it.”

Accepted or respected? “Respected. Maybe this is with rose tinted hindsight, it’s not a bullying school or a particularly tough school, it’s a place that respects people’s differences. I would want my kids to go to a school where their passions were brought out.”

Will he send his boys there? “We haven’t decided, they are only 6 and 7. My inclination is I don’t want them to leave home, I want to keep them here as much as possible.”

He really loves being at home, he loves hanging out with his children and being in the lovely garden his wife created.  You can tell he’s the sort of man that likes a solid base. It allows him to be flighty when he needs it. He met his wife at Trinity College, Dublin, they were together until he went to drama school and then it ended. 

Was it a painful break up? “No, it was geographical, it was just that I was moving away. We always kept in touch, then we found we were both living in London and things had moved on… Meaning that I wasn’t with the mother of my daughter anymore and she wasn’t with her husband. So we hooked up.” 

He makes it sound very practical but I ask him getting back with the woman he was together with at college is very romantic? “Yes” he says not wanting to be drawn in. They got married in 2010, in Ireland in the grounds of her family estate. He wore a shamrock coloured waistcoat and their children were baptised the next day. The family castle Glin Castle in West Limerick has been in the Fitzgerald’s family for 700 years.  It was recently sold for £4.6 million, which must have brought a great deal of family sadness. Catherine is the daughter of the 29th and last Knight of Glin. Desmond Fitzgerald died in 2011 with no male heir. Glin Castle hosted Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful back in the day. Catherine said at the time that they couldn’t afford the upkeep of such a place. Shorty before her father’s death he said, “It is my greatest hope that Glin will remain in the family and be enjoyed and cherished long into the future. 

And it seems sad that that’s now not the case but all he will say is that he can’t talk about his wife’s family.

He grew up catholic, is he still catholic? “Culturally more than anything else we were brought up going to mass every week. I don’t do that anymore but I enjoy the liturgy, the music, the culture.” He enjoyed a period of closeness with his father when his parents separated and he moved back to Ireland. “My parents had seven children and were married for 26 years and when they split up it turned out to be a great opportunity for me to spend the last 10 years of my father’s life getting to know him very well. I became very close with him. We still have his house, a little bungalow in Ireland that he lived in there. He left that to all of us to enjoy and we go there often. It’s a bungalow by the sea.” Do you go there to check in with your Irish heritage? “No, it’s just that it’s a really nice spot.”

There’s quite a few pauses where you feel him reeling himself in. He’s wary with the interview process because he’s been lured into talking too much and then regretting it. Indeed, when I first met him at a jazz evening at the Caprice a few years ago, he spent a whole evening talking about how he had been filleted like a kipper by an interviewer. He felt that he’d been trapped and he’d had sleepless nights worrying about it. Not that he cared about being a target but he cared very much about the other people who were embroiled. There’s no doubt there’s been pain and passion shared in his life, he couldn’t be such a precise actor, drawn to characters known for their complexity. 

For me his portrayal of Richard Burton was thrilling, so flawed, so vulnerable, so nasty, so amazing, “He was a hero of mine from an early age. I read Melvin Bragg’s book ‘Rich’. It’s not an objective book it’s a paean. He was obviously deeply in love with Burton, who was a rather tragic man but a wonderful actor. When it was first suggested that I might be playing him it was daunting for me because I loved him so much. There are probably only two or three people in the world that could play Liz Taylor and Helena Bonham-Carter was probably the best of them. I didn’t know her before we met on set, she was so completely possessed by the character, I was never quite sure where Elizabeth ended and Helena began! Until afterwards and we became good friends.” 

In the past he said it was he who initiated the break up with the mother of his eldest daughter (Polly Astor), because he just wasn’t ready to settle down .Whatever other complexities surround the issue is not what he wants to talk about. He is very proud of Martha his daughter, now 17. When she was young she played Paul Bettany’s daughter in ‘Creation,’ but he’s even prouder of the fact that now she’s taking her studies seriously. 

Soon, he’ll be going to upstate New York for another series of ‘The Affair’. For someone who loves his home so much, he certainly spends a long time away from it. He corrects me . ”It’s the most important factor in my decision about work, I don’t spend a lot of time away from home. This year I’ll do ‘The Affair’ and my family will come out for the summer and Autumn half-term and then I’ll be at home for the rest of the year. It’s all very carefully thought out because they are at an age now where I don’t want to miss any of it. It’s the most important thing in my life at the moment.”

It’s interesting to me that his work schedule is so carefully choreographed as he doesn’t want to be away from his family. Probably because we think of him as being like the shiftier characters he likes to play. ‘The Affair’ is the kind of show people get really obsessed with and love to binge watch. I heard recently that his wife had never even watched it. Is that because she didn’t want to see him naked and shagging? “No not at all. She just hasn’t got time. She’s so extremely busy. She runs a very successful career and four kids. She’s involved in a 9-year project to redo the gardens at Hillsborough Castle in Ireland, it’s a massive job and the plan is to attract 50,000 visitors a year. She really IS amazing.”

Catherine has been wafting in and out, getting things done, managing to look beautiful with not even a hint of make up or a hairbrush. She has now managed to catch an episode. It was on a plane and her attitude to all the sex is it’s just his job. “And that’s my attitude too. If you’ve got 30 people standing around sticking microphones in your face, it’s not an erotic experience at all.”

He pulls a face and goes on to tell me how much he doesn’t like being on top. “If you’re on the bottom you don’t have to take your clothes off.” He doesn’t think  should take their clothes off for sex scenes either no matter how it’s sold to them about the part requiring it. “Of course there are circumstance where that is the case. But often it’s just not true and that’s why from the age of 45-50 is difficult for women, Hollywood is no longer interested.”

You see he is a feminist. Of course that’s not true for 46 year-old males!

A few years ago he walked to the South Pole with Walking Wounded Soldiers. “There was a blind guy, a Scottish soldier with no legs, a couple of American women soldiers with only one leg. The great thing is if you are with walking wounded, you can’t complain, it spurred me on to see them.”

Prince Harry went on the same expedition. He has described Prince Harry as hilarious, his still for making lavatories and when his team arrived at the Pole he drank champagne from a prosthetic leg.  “Very few people get to go there and that’s why I went. It’s a vast frozen ocean, there’s nothing there, not even bacteria. Every footprint, every time you go to the loo, it’s there forever.”

It does seem to be a pretty diverse team? “I think it was for TV profile that they had me, but they had Prince Harry so they didn’t need me and in the end I wasn’t really used at all but it was a way of getting publicity for a charity that aims to get work for ex-servicemen, particularly wounded ones. I’m also doing a walk across the Western Front. My grandfather was blown up there in 1916, not many people my age are close to the first world war. My brother sent a picture of him dressed in rabbit furs aged about 20 and somehow that was really affecting for me. Lads of 19 and 20 being so cold and hungry that their infantry uniform was supplemented by rabbit furs.” He’s doing the walk for the same charity and our moment of sadness is punctuated by his little girl now gurgling and laughing. 

“What amazes me is how my parents managed with 7 of us. My mum always said once you have three they look after themselves, which I’m yet to witness because at the moment they are all just trying to kill each other. I’m amazed at what my parents managed. They gave us a very, very happy childhood and I’m hoping to do that with mine as well. “

I had expected West to be a whole lot darker.  Who knew that he was hiding such sweetness?  Domestic is that last thing I would have imagined him as.  Before I leave I watch him playing with his daughter, who stopped crying at last in her father’s arms. I hadn’t expected to be ‘Finding Daddy’. That just adds to his allure.  Dominic West, charming man, bad boy, good dad.