Actor Hugh Dancy admits his latest role as a man living with Asperger syndrome was one of his most daunting yet. He tells Susan Griffin how he prepared for it, and what his life is like now he’s engaged to Claire Danes

In rom-com land, a man who can’t say ‘I love you’ never gets the girl. Yet romantic indie film Adam breaks all the rules, featuring a leading man who has no idea what love is.

Living with a form of autism known as Asperger syndrome, Adam (played by Hugh Dancy) is a charming, kind and humblingly straightforward man, unable to relate to human emotions.

“I did think of it as the ‘anti-acting’ role,” explains Dancy, last seen opposite Isla Fisher in Confessions of a Shopaholic.

“Everything you usually bring to a role, like empathy and connection and communication and reaction were denied me.”

In the film, Adam embarks on a relationship with Beth, played by Rose Byrne from hit American TV show Damages, and, as Dancy explains, while on one hand Adam’s future love is challenged by his disability, on the other he lives a genuinely free life.

“There’s no agenda to Adam, no dishonesty, no duplicity and he consistently says the things that we all wish we could say, but are barred by social conventions,” says Hugh.

Clearly such innocent, disaster-prone behaviour could lend itself nicely to a romantic comedy, but Hugh says the team were careful to avoid ridiculing Adam’s behaviour.

“It shares the structure of rom-com, but it’s also subverting it,” says Hugh. “Adam is at times a very funny character, but one of the keys was never stepping outside the character for the sake of a joke,” he says.

Sitting on the edge of the sofa with his legs stretched out in front of him, Hugh is the archetypal English gent. Charming, well-spoken and articulate, he’s dressed in an understated outfit of jeans, white shirt and grey jacket. A regular in ‘Most Beautiful’ polls, it’s clear why British fashion house Burberry chose him to front one of their campaigns.

“There aren’t many scripts like this,” Huge adds. “I started reading it and had no idea what the story was and just thought, ‘What’s up with this guy?”’

“When Adam announces he has the condition I was intrigued.

“First of all there was some justification for all the questions I’d had, and secondly I thought what a brave intelligent way to tell that story, to not announce up front, but to let the audience, through Rose’s character, get to know him as a human being.”

Knowing nothing about Asperger syndrome, Hugh realised he had a lot of work ahead of him if he was to do justice to the role.

“I was nervous, daunted and rightly so,” he says, adding that his concerns were eased after meeting the film’s director, Max Mayer.

“I think I had a sense, which turned out to be true, that it would be a very solitary experience because basically the guy operates in a bubble most of the time.”

“Although the finished product is Rose and Adam, the experience was much more self-contained than that,” he says.

As part of his research Hugh visited people who live with Aspergers.

“I had to do a lot of ground work to get to the point where that would be helpful. Plus you don’t want to sit there knowing nothing, it’s not exactly going to inspire confidence,” he says.

“But the ones who agreed to sit and talk to me were incredibly generous and open and frank about their lives and their own obstacles.”

“One of the first things I realised was that the range of behaviour and symptoms is vast and that freed me up in away because I thought well I’m not trying to play every person with Aspergers.”

Made in just 22 days on location in New York, Hugh says while they were filming he had an assumption and deep-set fear that no one would see it.

“I know when you make a movie on this scale, on this tiny budget, you’re just swimming up river,” he says.

His worries proved unfounded and the film proved a success when it was shown at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.

But he admits that filming Adam was a very different experience to his last box office hit, Confessions of a Shopaholic, produced by Hollywood heavyweight Jerry Bruckheimer.

“It’s a lot more comfortable on Bruckheimer sets,” he says of the differences between working on big blockbusters and small independent movies. “I mean physically,” he adds laughing.

“Really, the only constant difference is that on the big budget movies not only do you have a crew watching but a lot of people behind the camera and a lot of voices go into the mix. In Confessions it would occasionally become like bedlam.”

“There were too many voices,” he adds. “Adam was wholly different, the script was the script and that’s why I signed to it.”

Although he’s making waves in Hollywood, Hugh’s resolute there’s no permanent move to LA planned. “Oh no, my home is here in London, nowadays more in New York as well for personal reasons.”

The personal reasons he refers to is his recent engagement to the New York-based actress Claire Danes who he met on the set of Evening in 2007.

As Adam makes some poignantly romantic gestures in the film, it seems only fitting to ask Hugh what the most romantic thing is he’s ever done. “I’ve taken someone away on a surprise holiday,” he says after a pause.

“Most things that are bracketed in romance like buying flowers, you do to make people feel nice, which I suppose is romantic with a small ‘r’. The reason Adam is so romantic is because he’s sharing himself, almost nakedly. It’s the sprit in which he does things which is romantic.”

As for what Hugh thinks of Max’s belief that his turn as Adam is Oscar-worthy, he nervously laughs and says: “It was honestly done without any sense of a career move because I never stopped to step outside think how it might look.

“I just really like to take roles that scare me and this scared the pants off of me.”

Adam opens in cinemas today