And I need endless affirmation - I'm a neurotic actor, so of course.' A smile flutters across his face. So I find a bit of him that I can get close to, which with Silas is he wants an affirmation. I've kicked and I've punched but I've never stabbed. Does he tap into an inner well of nastiness when playing violent men? 'Well, I'm not a psychopath,' he says soberly, 'which should thrill you, bearing in mind you're alone in a room with me.' Indeed, the worst he has ever physically hurt anybody has been in common-or-garden punch-ups 'with my fists. The last time he felt that sense of satisfaction in a role was, he says in Gangster No 1. And I enjoyed acting again - 'cos I hadn't for a couple of years.' And I actually felt invigorated by the part. 'But, anyway, Silas finishes off his portion of the story calling himself a ghost. ' he observes, before drifting back to the subject. ' Bettany pauses and frowns slightly, 'I love the word portion!' he declares. And suddenly there's a purpose to who he is and how good he is at hurting people, and he becomes a sort of weapon for that man and then he ends up, his portion of the story becomes. Is saved by this bishop called Aringarosa who he in turn saves, and he calls him an angel. He starts off his life, and he's called a ghost by his dad. 'It's just having something meaty and complicated but sort of clear. 'You know what? I had so much fun doing it,' he says of playing Silas. It is the bad roles that Bettany relishes. On screen this can be used to convey a peculiarly wholesome prettiness - as Tom, in Lars von Trier's Dogville, or as a faded tennis player in Wimbledon - or to unsettling effect, as a struttingly brutal upstart in Gangster No 1, for example, or now in The Da Vinci Code. And what, precisely, would I be doing during the running, throttling and punching? 'Looking butch, but shocked,' he advises, with a smirk.Р”В«ettany has the type of bleached-out colouring that makes looking at him something like blinking through the midday sun. 'Because that would be me running at you, throttling you and then punching you in the stomach.' I see. 'That would be a bad one to choose,' Bettany laughs. Hence I propose to Bettany that we act out his favourite scenes, he in his part as Silas, the murderous albino monk, and I will play Hanks's role as Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbiologist charged with unravelling the riddle of a clandestine Catholic society. In the light of this fact, discussing the film with one of said stars, Paul Bettany, could well prove a little tricky. These are, however, extenuating circumstances: since its inception, the film adaptation of Dan Brown's preposterously successful Catholic conspiracy novel, The Da Vinci Code, has been the subject of so much anticipation and controversy that its producers have swaddled it in secrecy and refused advance screenings, even as they offer interviews with its stars.

Nevertheless, this, curiously, is where we find ourselves today. I t is not often that one finds oneself sitting in Claridge's hotel pretending to be Tom Hanks.

Da vinci code paul bettany