Steve Pratt finds out how nervous-looking actor Ben Wishaw shaped up to his physical role as a serial killer obsessed with capturing the scent of a woman.

STILL only 26, Ben Wishaw is leading the sort of charmed life on stage and screen that most rising young British actors can only dream about. His turn as Shakespeare's troubled Prince of Denmark in Trevor Nunn's "youth" version of Hamlet at London's Old Vic a few years earned him rave reviews.

And to top that, he shot James Bond on the big screen. Before Daniel Craig took up 007's licence to kill, Wishaw's character - another troubled young man - put a bullet in him in the British crime thriller Layer Cake.

Wishaw gets top billing over Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman in his latest movie, Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer, the screen version of Patrick Suskind's bestselling novel. In this tale of scents and sensibility, he plays Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born into poverty in 18th century France but possessing a very refined sense of smell that leads him to murder young women in order to extract their aroma and make the ultimate perfume. Before the interview, Wishaw asks if anyone minds if he smokes. He proceeds to chain smoke, not inhaling but using the cigarette as a prop to disguise his nervousness. He's thin and wiry, adding to his general angst-ridden air. Perhaps the oddest scene in Perfume involved Grenouille witnessing a mass outdoor orgy scene. He says. "At first you don't know where to look. I found my eyes were always resting on the most inappropriate area. But the extras were so up for it, they were really, really great. They work with this theatre company, and were quite heavily choreographed."

The whole movie isn't your usual Hollywood blockbuster, reflecting Wishaw's eclectic career choices. Past work includes playing Keith Richards in Stoned, the film about fellow Rolling Stone Brian Jones, and he's just completed a movie, I'm Not There - or "this Bob Dylan thing" as he calls it.

"It's a film about Dylan where he's played by six different people. One of them is Cate Blanchett, one of them is a 12-year-old black kid, and one of them is me. The others are Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Christian Bale," he explains.

"So it's not at all conventional or a straightforward, naturalistic biopic. It's much more expressionist. Todd Haynes, the director, is much more interested in exploring the different faces of this man who seems to reinvent himself every time he comes back into the public sphere."

The project sounds as unusual and tricky as bringing Perfume to the screen. Wishaw knew of the book, which sold 15 million copies worldwide, but had never read it before auditioning after director Tom Twyker saw his Hamlet and decided he'd be ideal.

With his sense of smell such a key part of the story, presumably the actor's nose was auditioned too. "I suppose it must have been, I was thinking about that the other day - it must have been quite important but I didn't think about it," he says.

The character doesn't have much to say for himself, so the actor needed to convey a lot physically rather than verbally. "It was daunting but that was part of the appeal I suppose, the fact that it's not like anything I've seen before," he says.

"It was just about trying to find a way of making the character expressive and accessible to people through physicality and what was going on in the face and that kind of thing. Which is not something that's easy to direct really. It's harder to reach those things, it's a bit more hit and miss."

His stage work was helpful when it came to playing such a physical role. That meant it was quite a tough shoot but being uncomfortable didn't matter. "It was quite grim in that respect, but for me that's part of the fun of it. I love that. In theatre, everything's obviously imagined but on the set everything was totally real. So the mud and the filth was there and tangible. That was a riot for me. You can let your imagination run totally free because everything's feeding you. That was a totally joyful thing.

"It certainly didn't smell as bad on set as it probably looks, although the fish market was fairly diabolical. That was totally authentic. But it wasn't as repulsive as particularly those early scenes appear."

Despite his success on film, he's not planning to abandon the stage. "I love it too much. Now I actually watch far more films that I do theatre, but it's the place where you really learn the most. So many of these great actors constantly dip back into it, even if they primarily do film. It's a testing ground for an actor. I hope I would never leave it behind."

* Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer (15) opens in cinema on Boxing Day.