After ten years away from Shakespeare, Toby Stephens returns from TV and movie success to take on the tragic starring role of Hamlet. He talks to Viv Hardwick about his famous parents, Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith, and a Bollywood blockbuster.

AN artist's impression of the late Robert Stephens in full Royal Shakespeare Company costume stares down at his son Toby as he sits in the RSC's dark wooden library discussing his return to Stratford-upon-Avon and the Newcastle tour. Toby has won his spurs as a stage actor and moved on to the heights of James Bond villainy in movie Die Another Day, but always had a better relationship with famous mum Maggie Smith than his late actor father Robert.

So would he be less relaxed and agreeable if dad's ghost paraded around the room as he discusses playing the title role in Hamlet? Does he in fact use the great man for inspiration? Toby reveals that dad Robert never played the Prince of Denmark, but once starred as Horatio alongside Peter O'Toole.

He pauses just slightly before he adds: "I didn't think about what he would have done with Hamlet, he'd have done it wonderfully but in a very different way from me. No, obviously, being here I think about him a lot."

The comparisons with his father were highest when a decade ago he turned in an award-winning version of Coriolanus for the RSC before being snapped up for high profile BBC series like Cambridge Spies, Perfect Strangers and The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall... and then there was that Bond movie as the baddie.

He says: "It's really odd when someone tells me it's been ten years, it's quite a shock and I'm depressed because the time has just gone so quickly. It was also a shock to realise that it was ten years since I'd done any Shakespeare. So it felt right to me that I should get back to it."

The 35-year-old admits that he'd had no motivation to play Hamlet until RSC artistic director Michael Boyd came calling. "I could see it was a brilliant play, but I'd always left productions feeling that I'd lost my sympathy for the main character. He'd lost me somewhere in the play and that bothered me because I don't think Shakespeare wanted that to happen."

His problems with Hamlet come in the second half and he also feels that a lot of actors, when it came to the soliloquies tend to "sidestep them and rattle through them... because 'yeah-yeah we all know about that one, let's get on', rather than addressing them head-on. I'm not saying that I can do any better, but I just felt I wanted to tackle them head-on because they are the moments when you get to know Hamlet and what's going on inside him."

He is desperate to avoid Hamlet's words becoming a "perambulatory, philosophical speculation" along the lines of 'let's take time out of the play and have a little intellectual doodle rather than the moral hurdles he's facing'.

Asked about a belief in ghosts he says: "I'd like to believe in ghosts and whenever I hear ghost stories I like to believe in them and in this play. One of the main things discussed when I first met with Michael was that I told him I'd never seen an effective ghost and always found it rather comic with an old geezer clunking on in armour and under a green light. It always looks a bit hokey. We agreed we needed a ghost that was unnerving."

Toby feels that dynamism and energy have been brought to the production with some pretty swingeing cuts "which are all good, otherwise you're asking the audience to be there for four-and-a-half hours".

"It's the most personal play to a lot of people and loads have opinions, very hard and fast opinions and presenting it the way we do is inevitably going to piss people off. I went on the other night and I did 'to be or not to be' and some guy in the front row added 'that is the question?' and I thought 'oh God'. Another night I left out half the speech by accident and there was rustling pages and people tutting and sighing."

So what has he been doing for ten years since his award-winning portrayal of Coriolanus, comes one cheeky question. "Well, just jobbing. Doing a lot of TV, films, plays in London, what actors do," he says, somewhat modestly. The Bond movie role in Die Another Day was a freak occurrence he claims.

"They were seeing all the youngish British actors for the part and I met the director and that led to a screen test and after months of major wrangles with MGM, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, the producers, wanted me to do it but the financiers desperately didn't and were after some big American star. But it was completely unexpected and I certainly wasn't aiming to be in a Bond movie. I enjoyed it thoroughly, it was pretty hard not to.

"MGM were incredibly graceless and that was hard because you were always aware at any moment that they could fire you. I remember talking to Pierce Brosnan about this and he remembers when he was cast as Bond nobody spoke to him about the rushes or his performance for 11 weeks. Normally, they'll come to you after the first session of rushes and say 'yeah we love what you're doing, you look great' or some bollocks complement to make you feel better."

After going through the mill somewhat as Bond baddie Gustav Graves in 2002 and then shooting a four-month film in India, it seemed right to return to live audiences. He says: "This will do for a while, I'm really glad I made the decision to come back and do this. For me doing theatre is soul-food because with film and TV you don't have editorial choice, your performance is governed by other people: directors, producers, editors, cameramen. While on stage no one is going to stop you in full flow and say 'no I don't like that'."

"I think after doing this I'll have to make some money and also get my hand back in with some film and TV."

He reveals that he and mum Maggie Smith have never talked about doing stagework together because if would spoil their mother-son relationship. But he adds: "I wouldn't mind doing a scene in a film, but I want to retain that compartmentalisation.

"I'm not comfortable about people prying into my private life and I don't think anyone's particularly interested... and also it would be incredibly boring for them," he jokes, bursting into laughter.

After Hamlet, cinema audiences are likely to see him next in a Bollywood epic called The Rising, based on the Indian Mutiny in 1857.

He says: "It's a Bollywood film in the fact that half the cast are Indian and half are English but I think it's the biggest film they've ever done, the highest budget and a huge undertaking. They've done two versions, one in Hindi and the other one is in English. So I had to learn huge tracts of dialogue in Hindi which was very time-consuming, but I loved the experience."

Toby plays a Scotsman, based on the real-life Captain William Gordon, who goes over to the side of the mutineers. Gordon died on the walls of Delhi fighting against the British.

* Hamlet brings up the curtain on the Royal Shakespeare Company residency on Tyneside and runs Monday-Saturday.

Published: 28/10/2004