Ridley Scott had asked you to put on 50lbs to play Ed Hoffman in Body Of Lies. How did it go?

You can probably understand that this is really tedious for me to talk about, because how many times have you seen my body change in movies in the last 20 years? You know I’m gonna do it, I just do it; it’s no big deal. I don’t think of it as a big deal. I don’t want any pats on the back for it. I think it’s right for the character. It’s the way Ridley has seen the character, so I do it. Yeah, it’s painful, and the pain still goes on now, you know? But I went from 88 kilos to 117 kilos. When I get back to about 85, that’ll be the journey completed. But I’ll take my time. I’m not rushing to get back because somebody in a magazine calls me a rude name or something. It’s just part of the function of doing it. I happen to believe that it’s more real for the people in the audience if you’re playing a boxer and you look like a boxer. It’s as simple as that.

Your character has to make some pretty tough decisions and yet seems to carry on a perfectly normal home life...

Ed doesn’t feel the pain of any of the decisions he makes. He’s completely insulated from that. He’s tens of thousands of miles away at the end of a phone line.

Do you think this movie has any political underpinnings?

I don’t think Ridley has made a choice to push any particular political agenda. If anything, he’s created an atmosphere or a world — the world of espionage. This is the world where spies live, and in the world where spies live, there are no good guys and bad guys. This movie is about deception, it’s about seduction and it’s about abandonment. These are the themes of the film. Not politics.

Is Ridley Scott a friend as well as a close collaborator?

Absolutely. We don’t have a thing where we want to keep a separate social agenda when we’re working. We don’t need it. We have our social agenda in the times when we’re not working. We go out to dinner, and our wives get together, and we really enjoy each other’s company. But when we’re working, we’re just working. And we’re working 24-hours a day in that respect. If something needs discussion, you discuss it. So, when we get on the set, there aren’t that many decisions to make now because we’ve actually covered a lot of ground already. When we’re on the set, it’s now a matter of being brutally honest. Does it suck? If it sucks, let’s do it again. If it doesn’t suck, we might be getting somewhere. It’s simply like that. We just like to be fresh and visceral and [let the film] have its own sense of reality and working quickly assists that.

How fast do you work?

Ridley worked out a long time ago that it’s actually more efficient to shoot a big film in 10 weeks with five cameras rather than 20 weeks with two. And I like that attitude because it means when I’m talking to you, both of us are on camera, and both of what we’re doing, the push and the pull, the reaction and the action, they’re all captured at the same time. And that, to me, is a generational step forward. He has taken the process of making a film, and made it, much more immediate. He sits in front of his five screens, his five monitors — he’s got five camera crews going — and he works like a painter. He has his palette; he has all his options available to him, and if he wants a dab of red — POW! He puts it in there right then and there. He doesn’t wait until later to judge himself; he’s judging himself right now. So he’s working, he’s not sitting back. And a lot of people who direct a film, they do that. They sit back and they let it wash over them, and in post-production, they form their film. He has already cut most of his film before it gets into post-production. And you know, it just, it suits me as a person, to work like that.

Did that method of working together develop over time?

At first when I worked with Ridley on Gladiator, it probably wasn’t as clear in my mind, and then I did a few more films afterwards, and then he rang me about stuff, and I wasn’t necessarily interested in the things he wanted to do. Or I was interested, but I wasn’t available, or I wasn’t willing to take the extra step to sort of force the schedule to make myself available. And after X amount of time had gone by, it was getting really clear that it was actually going to be very difficult for us to get back together and work now. Because now X amount to time had gone by, the expectation of what we might do was now gigantic, so you either live up to that, and you try and find what is the perfect vehicle for us to work together again, or you just make the decision, ‘You’re my kind of bloke, I’m your kind of bloke, what do you feel like doing now and let’s just do that.’ So, we’ve [since] done A Good Year, American Gangster, and now this. And it’s all based on the fact that I will now say yes to Ridley, and then I’ll work out my reasons for doing a movie.

How does it feel to work with Leo again?

Great. Fabulous. We really got on when we were both younger fellows and in a really wonderful way it was revisiting that time in both of our lives. On The Quick and the Dead, we were in a situation where we had Sharon Stone and Gene Hackman there, and we had this raft of great character actors with 20, 30 years of experience behind them, and there was the two of us, right. Now we had this sort of elevated status in the cast list, but back then we were both new kids on the block to a large degree, even though I had been in the business since the age of six, and Leo had done stuff as a kid as well. We were both getting attention, and we were given the status, so you were kind of getting this thing where you have expectation coming from this way, and questions coming from this way, and it basically just put us in the situation where we were on the same plane and so we hung out, you know? We didn’t have the agendas that other people had — we just wanted to enjoy the experience as much as we could, so that’s what we did. Two major things that have changed with Leo — now he can drink legally and he is no longer a virgin (laughs).

Those are the only things that have changed about him over the years?

Do you know how pleasant that is to find out? That he’s still that same kid who can laugh easily — he’s got a great heart. He’s connected to the environment and the world around him, and to find out that with all the commercial success and all the pressure on him, that they didn’t get to him — they didn’t attack his core, they didn’t change him fundamentally as a person — is wonderful. And the funny thing is, I’ve got all that stuff going through my mind, and a minute after we started laughing together when we met up on this, I could see in his eyes that he had this going on too. I can just imagine what he would have read about me, and he must have been thinking, ‘whoa, he’s changed.’ And we get together, and it’s the same thing. If you can communicate, and if you can laugh and if your heart’s in the right place, then you’re definitely the sort of person, one, I want to hang out with, and two, I want to work with.

Do you think spending so much time in Australia has helped you stay the same?

Oh, that’s one element of it. But I think I would have been the same person whether I lived in Sydney or Syracuse, it wouldn’t matter. You’re either predestined to become somebody else’s version of who you are, or predestined to stick to your own guns.

Body Of Lies releases this Friday