Britsh actor Hugh Dancy was dashing in King Arthur, urbane in New York romance Confessions Of A Shopaholic and a modern Mr Darcy in The Jane Austen Book Club. He grapples with romance in the Big Apple again in his latest film, Adam, only this time his character boasts none of that easy sophistication – Adam suffers from Asperger’s syndrome. Here, the star reveals his own confusion on first reading the script, why this is no ordinary rom-com, and how President Obama was his unlikely inspiration…

This film has been labelled a ‘romantic comedy’. But it’s not really, is it?
“I agree. It surprised me how much it shared in the structure of romantic comedy, but it’s also subverting romantic comedy. Yes, that’s the difficulty and the challenge of making the movie in that you can’t do it in three words, but at least – what I’m glad about is that – everybody I’ve spoken to just gets it. I think the heart of the movie is very simple and pure, even though there’s great complexity surrounding it.”

Did it defy your own expectations when you first read the script?
“Yeah. I knew nothing about it at all. I started reading and, I think, like someone watching the movie, they’d think, ‘Well, what’s up with this guy?’ I thought eventually a reason for his behavior would present itself. It was hidden; a character that’s a little ill-behaved and it’s ill-defined and it’s annoying… I thought it was a really brave and intelligent way to tell that story, to not announce it up front, to not give him a tag or diagnose him instantly so the audience, through Rose and his character, get to know him as a human being. Simultaneously I realized I was going to have to do a lot of work if I went any further because I knew nothing, literally nothing. I didn’t even know that you would consider Asperger’s to be a form of autism. I knew nothing.”

It must’ve been a daunting challenge to play someone who can’t really ‘feel’…
“Yeah, it is, because as you know most actors are just running around like a bundle of nerves, full of ridiculous shrieking emotion – Umm, no, that’s flippant. It’s true that I did think of it as the anti-acting role because everything that you bring to the job, normally, like empathy and communication, connection and reaction were just denied me… I did quite a lot of work. I knew that to get to the point where the movie could be about the two of them, I had to first of all be very specific about him; exactly who he was and to just get to the point. You know it’s one thing to understand – and even that’s tough – to understand rationally what Asperger’s might be, but it’s another thing to inhabit it. Not that I did inhabit it, but you know what I mean, to convince the audience and yourself enough to portray it.”

So, there was nothing you could relate to. It was a completely alien character?
“I think the specifics of it were alien but once I’d done that first bit of work, the broader strokes we can all identify with. I mean, in terms of someone trying to make a connection with someone else – you know the frustration of that – so then, yeah, I identify with that, but not really in ways that particularly helped me with what I was doing. It’s more like when I watch the movie now; I feel for him, for myself, but that’s a different experience. Does that make sense? I never sat down and thought, ‘What do I share with this character?’ That wasn’t part of the process. I knew that there was far more that divided us than united us. No, actually! That’s unfair. Maybe I should be careful about that. I think it’s true, as President Obama says many, many times, ‘There’s more to join us than divide us!’”

You met people with Asperger’s. Did you notice their reluctance to make eye contact?
“Yes, absolutely. Although, that said, I did meet people that didn’t have a problem with that because they’d learnt early enough, I suppose, to get over that. They learn to look people in the eye. In fact sometimes they’re like [stares hard]. It’s incredibly off-putting. All of that, the movement, the stymieing, you know that constant repetitive movement, is something you have to be very careful with because if you’re doing it too much, even if you’re being accurate, that’s all people will see.”

Were you, at any point, terrified that you might get it wrong?
“No, I was nervous. I was daunted. Rightly so, I think. I had a clear sense of all the different potential ways to fail, which is probably another way of saying that I had a sense of how it could work if we did it right, but I knew that I would need help. And I had a sense of the fact that turned out to be true; that it would be a very solitary experience because basically the guy operates in a bubble, so although the finished product you see is about me and Rose, the experience was much more self-contained than that.”

Hopefully there was some light relief between takes…
“Yes, there was. I mean there was because there would be no benefit to trying to remain thoroughly in character between scenes. I’ve got to be able to step out of character and go, well, communicate, in a way that he couldn’t do. Rose is delightful, really charming, really easy-going, there’s no bulls**t about her whatsoever. But it was a fairly – it was a very quick shoot. Something like 22 days. For most of the time I had a big book with me and I would just go and read between scenes.”

Adam can be seen in UK cinemas from tomorrow.