Hard work if you can get it

IS IT possible that the nation's most popular TV faces in 2007 will be two dashingly handsome actors from Renfrewshire? The place of Paisley's David Tennant is already secured as everybody's favourite Dr Who. Now lining up to win a similar number of hearts is Douglas Henshall, the 40-year-old star of Lipstick On Your Collar, This Year's Love and The Lawless Heart, who's from neighbouring Barrhead.

He has just been putting the finishing touches on Primeval, a six-part series destined for prime-time ITV in which he plays an evolutionary scientist tracking down a plague of dinosaurs at loose in London after slipping through tears in the time continuum. Listen, it could happen, and with the team behind Walking With Dinosaurs on board, it's sure to be essential family viewing when it's broadcast early next year.

"It seemed an awful lot of fun," says Henshall, who is currently playing alongside Kim Cattrall in David Mamet's The Cryptogram at the Donmar Warehouse in London. "It was four months of acting with balls and sticks and having to imagine there was an enormous Pteranodon chasing after you. I've seen bits and pieces and they look very impressive."

If it does propel Henshall to a new level of popularity, it won't be before time. Ever since his earliest performances in Scotland in the late-1980s in 7:84 shows including No Mean City and The Sash and, notably, in Michael Boyd's Tron productions of Iain Heggie's Clyde Nouveau, Henshall has stood out as an actor of compelling intensity. The same charismatic power was evident in his bullying soldier in Dennis Potter's Lipstick On Your Collar, the 1950s fantasy drama series that gave Ewan McGregor a leg-up on the road to fame.

SINCE THEN, Henshall has clocked up a steady stream of stage and screen roles, including his award-winning turn as the unhinged Dr Daniel Nash in Psychos, the idealistic Levin in Anna Karenina and, most recently, an eight-month run in the West End in Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman.

"I try not to do things I can do standing on my head," he says. "If I was just turning up for work every day, saying my lines and going home, then I might as well have a normal nine-to-five job. Part of the pleasure I still get is to choose things that are difficult, challenging or that I haven't done before."

He has, however, become more relaxed about holding out for the perfect role. "I used to say 'no' a lot, waiting for this mythic job that was going to come along. Now I do what's in front of me, rather than what might be round the corner. I've discovered I'm good if I'm working. I like working and, if I'm not, I'm a bit of a pest round the house. My girlfriend's a writer [Croatian playwright Tena Stivicic] so I end up getting under her feet."

Work, not fame, is Henshall's spur, which must make the atmosphere less heated as he plays opposite Sex & The City's Kim Cattrall. "I didn't think about the fact that I was working with somebody who is terribly famous," says Henshall. "But she's fab. She's an incredibly dedicated, detailed performer. She's on the money every day. I've really enjoyed it; we get on very well and I've had a great time."

Mamet's play is an unsettling three-hander about two obsessive adults and one neglected child.

Henshall plays Del, a hard-drinking gay friend of Cattrall's Donny. Her adulterous husband is mysteriously absent and it's no coincidence that her 10-year-old son is suffering from insomnia. But behind Del's charm lurks the secret that he is complicit in the husband's betrayal. Written with Mamet's characteristic, tough-talking precision, it's a tense and atmospheric drama that keeps the audience guessing.

"Yes, my character is duplicitous, but he's been coerced into duplicity," says Henshall, whose role was first played in 1994 by Eddie Izzard. "It's a small betrayal that becomes huge. You don't find out he's gay until the end of the play - that's when you understand he's had feelings for her husband. I wanted to bring the emotional empathy and humanity I associate with most of the gay men I know."

Returning to Mamet after starring in American Buffalo in 1997 ("like a man on an amphetamine rush" was the Daily Telegraph's verdict), he's had to come to terms once more with the playwright's exacting style. "It's incredibly controlling," he says. "You're told how to do David Mamet by the way in which he writes. If you adhere to it, then it works. It's infuriating because it doesn't allow you any scope for interpretation which, as an actor, I think is partly why you're hired. I spend a lot of time in rehearsals thrashing about until eventually I come round to his way of thinking."

Henshall is not a performer who relies on research to get into character, preferring to trust instinct over intellect. Yet the remark by his director, Josie Rourke, that he is "an actor of extreme directness" leaves him momentarily lost for words. "The only thing I can do is try and be as honest as I possibly can and serve the writer," he says.

If acting opposite Cattrall is all in a day's work for Henshall - just as it was when sharing screen space with Willem Dafoe, Sean Penn and Kristin Scott Thomas - he's not above being star-struck himself.

"I worked with Billy Connolly a couple of times," he says, thinking back to The Big Man in 1990, Down Among the Big Boys in 1993 and Gentleman's Relish in 2001. "He's the only person who made me think: 'How am I going to talk to him?' because he's been part of my life since I was about seven.

"When my parents had friends round, at some point in the evening they'd listen to a wee bit of Billy Connolly. We would be told to go upstairs because we weren't allowed to listen to him. I longed to know what was so special about him. When I was finally allowed to listen to those records, I found out.

"So for me to work with him, I couldn't get past who he was before I could chill out. The only way to do that was to tell him. I did and he was so lovely, a delight."

As for his own career, he's in no rush to buy into Connolly levels of fame. "It'd be stupid to say it's not nice to get attention," he says. "But I don't thirst for that. But will I get it with Primeval? Who knows."

• The Cryptogram, Donmar Warehouse, London, until November 25; Primeval, ITV, early 2007