Tall, dark and loquacious, Stephen Fry has had a career full of variety. But, as he tells Steve Pratt, he may now have found his natural home - as a TV chat show host in a new Hollywood movie.

He's intelligent. He's witty. He's tall. And he uses long words that many of us can't even say, let alone spell. There are, you can see, many good reasons to hate wordsmith and wit Stephen Fry.

In turn, he might reasonably be jealous of his former performing partner Hugh Laurie, with whom he appeared in A Bit Of Fry And Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster. Laurie has now found fame in America starring in the US hospital series House.

"He's a superb actor," says Fry. "He decided to be good-looking which I thought was a rather cheap and obvious thing to do. He could have played many of the parts because he's so extraordinarily flexible and adaptable."

The pair were nearly reunited for an episode of House, until Fry was required at home and unable to travel to the US for filming.

In any event, he wouldn't want to be "stuck in telly hell", drawing attention to US producers demanding actors sign up for seven years before knowing if a series will take off.

Fry doesn't need the work. He's the one who can turn his hand to anything with the same confident, charming, amusing manner. His life has not been all plain sailing, including a short spell in prison for credit card fraud before going to Cambridge University and walking out of a London West End stage production ten years ago after becoming depressed and suicidal. All that's behind him as he pursues various careers, including that of movie star.

In the political thriller V For Vendetta he plays television host Gordon Deitrich, hired by the fascist government to produce a daily variety show, who upsets them when he tears up the script and pokes fun at the Chancellor. Masked man V, meanwhile, is plotting to do what Guy Fawkes failed to do - blow up Parliament.

Fry was unaware of V For Vendetta before being approached for the film. "I have to confess that the graphic novel is not a genre I was particularly familiar with," he admits. "I knew they existed and people of immense intelligence and discrimination, like Paul Gambaccini and Jonathan Ross, are absolutely fanatical about them."

Reading the novel, he realised that so much more can be done than in an ordinary novel. "I've always loved that whole genre of movies in the early Seventies like Logan's Run, Zardoz, Soylent Green and The Omega Man. Dystopia is the smart word for them. And we all, dare I say, sat through English lessons having to read Brave New World and 1984," he says.

"Then it kind of went out of fashion in the Eighties and Nineties, but now they seem to be coming back. Maybe it's something to do with the times we're living in, maybe we feel more threatened or paranoid, more concerned about our governments. It's just a perfect story for today."

His own comic reading as a child involved borrowing other people's Beano and Dandy. He recalls others, "like Victor war stories and I liked the Eagle before it merged with Look and Learn in a rather odd way. And what were called trash mags - those war comics, Commando, with a knife on the front".

What he loved about working on V For Vendetta, a Hollywood-backed movie made in London and Berlin, was working with a number of British actors who are so different to their American counterparts.

"It was wonderful to see faces that are not film starry - faces like my own, full of flesh and age and not vaguely concerned with how their teeth looked. It's a wonderful thing to see big close-ups of Stephen Rea and John Hurt and look at a real face.

"It made me realise how rare it is to see proper, lived-in faces like that on screen. Of course, it's what Americans think we all look like anyway, with ghastly teeth."

He also ended up working with the Prime Minister's son - perhaps why they got unprecedented access to Whitehall. "How we got permission I don't know and I was puzzling over this with the first assistant director. I said, 'How did you get permission, you usually can't get permission to do anything anywhere near seats of government. You know the secret service and various other people don't like it'.

"And I said, 'that boy's familiar. There was a boy in a sort of day-glo coat who was one of the assistant runners. I said, 'I'm sure I've seen him before', and he said, 'Yes, that's Euan Blair' and I said, 'Ah, that's how we got there'."

He also notes the "extraordinary achievement" of Hugo Weaving who plays V, his face unseen behind the grinning Guy Fawkes mask for the entire movie. Fry suggests that his voice sounded a bit like his Blackadder co-star Rowan Atkinson. "There was a scene in Blackadder 2 where Rowan puts a bag over his head, something to do with an execution, and it reminded me even more of that," he adds.

His V For Vendetta TV talk show host isn't based on anyone in particular. The closest we have is Jonathan Ross, although it's obviously not based on him. It's more of an American type of talk show in a way.

Fry is pleased this country isn't run by the Government through TV. "Whatever one's views on the war or legislation brought in to counter terrorism, which some people regard as counter to civil liberties, we can tell that critique of the Government is alive and well," he says.

"In many ways, one has to remember it's a big American studio film. I don't think you could have had an American-born terrorist destroying American symbols like the White House. They did destroy it in Independence Day but that was nasty aliens and there was a big speech at the end that we will rebuild.

"It's an old story: when does a terrorist become a freedom fighter, and vice versa? We've all seen terrorists become respected state leaders. There's no question, whatever one's view of terrorism, the very fact of doing something like putting a bomb in a restaurant is not as evil to us at all times as we might often say it is.

"It's great to see a big Hollywood film with a good story that isn't afraid to look at questions like that."

The film's American contingent, including director James McTeigue and producer Joel Silver, find Fry hilarious, tickled no doubt by his impressive way with words. So do Americans think he's posh? "They use the language differently," he says.

"The way we use language, simply on a syntactical level, the way we tend to use slightly more literary sentence structure, and be more attentive to the words we choose, is slightly dazzling or off-putting to them," he says. Then adds so as not to cause offence, "But they have a fantastic way of speaking too."

Fry likes being in movies but won't take a role for the sake of it. It must be true cinema, something that couldn't be told better in any other way. "Sometimes you get some marvellous literary scripts, but think the novel would be better or it could be a TV series," he says. "It's wonderful to think, 'oh I want to go to the cinema to go to that'. But I never have an idea or cloud in my head as to what medium I want to be in."

He made his directorial debut with Bright Young Things, his adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel Vile Bodies about partying young people in 1930s London. He would like to direct again and is puzzling between a number of scripts he's been sent.

"I have a feeling that I ought to write my own, because direction takes so long. It's two years out of your life, so it might as well be something that's entirely to do with you," he says.

Stephen Fry guests on Parkinson tonight (ITV1, 10.25pm).

V For Vendetta (15) is now showing in cinemas.