Hinds sight

“It’s beyond me, I just go from job to job,” he says. “I worked in the British and Irish system, mostly in theatre, for 15 years or so. I suppose it’s the most recent work that’s taken me outside the boundaries of Britain or Ireland.”

The start came out of the blue, with an offer to play the Russian President in the Hollywood thriller, Sum Of All Fears. All his dialogue was in Russian, but there was a hitch. “I haven’t a word of Russian,”

he told director Phil Alden Robinson.

“He said, ‘we need to start shooting in ten days. If we were to get tapes sent to you and maybe you could find a Russian person in London, could you start?’,” he recalls.

“It was so left-field. He’d obviously seen me somewhere, liked the look of me. I bit the bullet and said okay. Then it was a bit of a panic. Funnily enough, the next day we had the piano tuned at the house and the guy who came was Russian, so I started asking him about Russian, just phonetically.”

On the film set in Montreal, he was coached by a Russian girl. “I think I got away with it in the end. She laughed at me and said I sounded a bit like Stalin because I had a Georgian accent,” he says.

‘ITHOUGHT that was probably to do with me being Irish. That was quite thrilling to hear in a way.”

The film not only taught him Russian, but began the trend of working at home and abroad, allowing him to build up a CV that includes movies such as Road To Perdition, Miami Vice, Phantom Of The Opera, Munich and Calendar Girls.

On TV, he followed classic dramas such as Persuasion, Jane Eyre and The Mayor Of Casterbridge by playing Julius Caesar in the HBO/BBC epic series, Rome. He’s now on the big screen as sinister government agent and UFO hunter Henry Burke in the Disney family adventure, Race To Witch Mountain.

Science fiction isn’t his genre so he hadn’t seen the Seventies’ original version, but director Andy Fickman saw him on the Broadway stage, playing the devil in a Conor McPherson play, and thought of casting him as Burke.

There’s no plan behind Hinds’ career.

“What I think now is whether the role or the writing interests me, but mostly it’s about the people you do it with. The genre or the size of the role or where you do it isn’t the important thing,” he says.

As Race To Witch Mountain opens in UK cinemas, Hinds is on stage at the National Theatre, in London, in Peter Flannery’s stage version of the film, Burnt By The Sun.

The play is in repertoire, so when he has a few days off he boards Eurostar to return to his family – actress wife Helene and daughter Aoife – at their home in Paris, adding to his international lifestyle.

He’s happy to work on projects both great and small, no matter where they’re filmed. Some things are different between filming over here and in the US.

“In America, the size of the trailer is bigger – you get space to rest and prepare.

I’ve just been doing a short film for Conor McPherson in Ireland on a really small budget where there wasn’t anywhere to go between takes. You just had to find a space somewhere. It was shot by the seaside, so you’ve got a rock to sit on. You make your own tea and ask if anyone else wants tea while you put the kettle on,”

he says.

“In my career, I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve been taken on a lot of different adventures. This one, Race To Witch Mountain, is wacky science fiction and I had a great time making it.

“Some people look at me and say, ‘I thought you were supposed to do serious stuff’. But I’m seriously committed to it.

It won’t be to everybody’s taste, but that doesn’t matter. It’s made in the style the director wanted – a thrill ride for kids, and, hopefully, adults won’t find it too difficult to sit through.”

After the National Theatre season, there’s the possibility of doing another McPherson play in Dublin and there’s another screen role under discussion – as Aberforth Dumbledore, in Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows.

■ Race To Witch Mountain (PG) is now showing in cinemas.