Lunch with Mariella: Dominic West

The Wire star muses on his life and career while eating pigs' ears

"A pub with a Michelin star!" Dominic West announces, as though there could be no better thing on this earth, when he lopes into the room five minutes late for our rendezvous. "I can't tell you what a treat this is. I haven't been out for three years." It's a gross exaggeration. I saw him at the South Bank Show Awards where he tried to convince me our lunch date should take place in Spain. Before I've even written up this interview I've bumped into him again at a friend's charity dinner. He does, however, have some excuse for claiming the life of a recluse: three recent additions to family life.

"We can't do anything. We can't go anywhere. We've got three children under three. We can't move." The "we" includes partner Catherine Fitzgerald, whom he first dated at Trinity College, Dublin and then, when her subsequent marriage ended, picked up with again five years ago. They've clearly been busy! Then again Dominic West strikes me as a man of extremes.

You don't want to read too much into a venue but the upmarket, downplayed Harwood Arms certainly chimes with his image. The cabbie that dropped me off said the pub was once the haunt of Chelsea football fans. Not many will be demanding pints at the bar of what now exerts a gravitational pull for foodies. Having sampled the soda bread before Dominic arrived, I've all but died and gone to gourmet heaven already.

I've been reading my kids The Wind in the Willows and there's something of Toad in West's infectious enthusiasm as we peruse the menu. "I'm going to have crispy pig's ears… and cullen skink..." he announces, rubbing his hands with anticipatory excitement. They're reckless choices as he has no idea what cullen skink is. "Something horrible and Scottish I imagine," he says but doesn't change his order.

This propensity for eschewing his comfort zone goes further than his food choices. An old Etonian, and Catholic from a well-to-do Sheffield family, he shone as a coarse American cop in The Wire, the critically adored series set on the drug-infested streets of Baltimore. The character of hard drinking, Pogue-loving, womanising detective Jimmy McNulty, an old world guy in a new world city, won him plaudits and the hearts of half my girlfriends. He describes his first impression of the place where he was to spend much of the next five years of his life, "It was a sunny day and admittedly a lot of those houses were boarded up, behind them were shooting galleries [heroin dens] and on the corners were boys selling drugs. I thought, this looks fantastic compared to a high-rise in Sheffield."

In person the goofy, apologetic smile is positively carnivorous. Like the big bad wolf he opens his mouth to reveal an abundance of teeth. "All the better to eat you with," I'm thinking, as he gnaws on what looks like a cheese straw. It turns out to be the aforementioned ear. "Nothing but gristle," he exclaims in mock outrage, waving the deep-fried cartilage in my face. "Try it." I decline, and he goes on to clear his plate, before declaring, "I'm not having you writing, 'In cavalier fashion he ordered the pig's ear then didn't eat it.'"

It's like having lunch with your mischievous little brother – he's naughty but effortlessly charming. West's soliloquies are marked by self-deprecating humour and an understanding that his job doesn't rate on any Richter scale of hardship. "I'm 40 and I do struggle reconciling the absurdity of my job… celebrity is absurd in so many ways, so I do regularly torpedo any hope I might have of hitting the big time. It's a shame because there are lots of things about the big time that I'd like.

"Like what?" I ask.

"Now you mention it… the big time is for your 20s really, isn't it?" he says regretfully and refills our glasses with the nectar-like Cigale Blanc he ordered. "I do take my jobs seriously but there is a certain element in me that thinks it's not very important work and it isn't. It's an attitude I don't really like about myself."

He cheers himself up describing the enjoyable morning he's spent listening to a friend critique colleagues appearing on the London stage. "Not bitching myself, just wallowing in someone else's opinion on performances, particularly of friends. If they do badly, it gives me wings."

His lack of self-restraint frequently lands him in hot water. He tells me about a Hello! article in which he said Catherine was only interested in him for the money. She wasn't amused. I try and say things to be funny and that's what gets me in all sorts of trouble."

I wonder if it's part of his post-Eton armoury, this propensity for self-deflation and denying obvious familiarity with life's finer offerings, whether it's shooting weekend staples like cullen skink, or good wine.

"It's thought to be indecent, maybe only among Etonians, not to feel guilty about having gone to Eton. So I suppose there's over-compensation with someone like me in the profession I'm in. If I was a stockbroker or a banker it wouldn't be an issue, but as an actor I'm always slightly apologising."

He doesn't regard his privileged background as his best calling card. "I went to drama school which is the ultimate bastion of middle-classness in the mid-90s, where I got nothing but 'you went to Eton therefore you have no emotional access, very little emotional life, you don't know anything…' No one wants to watch a play about an Old Etonian living in suburban London. I mean it's not very interesting so you have to overcome that if you want to get employed."

So ensues a long anecdote, funny but definitely better for a thespian audience about his early lack of "emotional access" manifested by an inability to cry on stage. Required to emerge in a final scene sobbing and groaning, "the waste, the waste," he struggled valiantly against the odds until his fellow actors suggested a menthol stick in the eye just before you go on stage! These days he's got it down to a fine art as he discovered on a trip to New Orleans with his Wire co-star Wendell Pierce (who played McNulty's long-suffering sidekick Bunk) where he was greeted by a bunch of home boy fans as, "that bitch ass cry baby".

By now we're munching through our cod and fish stew respectively, both of which are delicious in a delicate, Celtic-influenced way; Ballymaloe House transplanted from Co Cork to SW6, if I had to find a comparison. In between mouthfuls I find myself answering endless questions about my upbringing, and it's proving near impossible to lob one in of my own. I'm flattered but slightly frustrated as we gambol on with our conversational ping-pong towards the bill, dessert denied because he has to take his 11-year-old daughter (from a previous relationship) to an audition for Martin Scorsese. "Scorsese isn't interested in me. When you do a film it's very hierarchical, there's the director and actors fairly near the top. Parents of child actors are lower than the shit on the shoes of the humblest runner."

It raises the question why he's putting his daughter through it. "As long as she furthers my career, I know she'll be happy ultimately," he grins.

"So are you torn between the exhibitionist side of you that craves the limelight and the other side that recognises it's a little superficial?" I ask, thrilled to have his attention at last.

"Are you torn between being the broadcaster and Sigmund Fucking Freud," he snarls back, then breaks the tension with that carnivorous smile. In my fantasies I'd put money on him howling at the moon. In real life he just dons his all-weather jacket and slinks out the door to his daughter's audition. If I'm honest, leaving me wanting more… dessert at least, that is. OFM

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Mariella Frostrup eats out with a celebrity