Who is hugh dancy dating

” He grins, looking more genuinely delighted than he has discussing any of his own achievements. I was once trying to get a reservation in a restaurant and what swung it, quite frankly, was that the maître d’ had seen my dad on that show.” Having just finished a stint on the New York stage in Venus in Fur, Dancy will spend the next three months in Toronto filming Hannibal, a television adaptation based on the Thomas Harris bestsellers.

He plays FBI agent Will Graham, with Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen in the title role.

It took me a good few years to feel that I was in the right profession.” Now that he’s established, is he very picky about the roles he chooses?

“If you get something generic, like a low-rent Four Weddings and a Funeral, you see it coming a mile off and you steer clear,” he says. Disney’s 2009 rom-com Confessions of a Shopaholic tanked, as did Basic Instinct 2 – the ill-fated sequel to the 1992 erotic thriller – directed by Dancy’s pal Caton-Jones.

It’s that stiff upper lip Britishness that they loved on Monty Python; you can imagine Terry Jones popping out from behind the curtain.” Raised in Newcastle-under-Lyme by his father, a moral philosopher, and mother, who works in academic publishing, Dancy attended boarding school from the age of 10, first the Dragon School in Oxford, then Winchester.

“I was as rebellious as one can realistically be in a traditional boarding school without being thrown out, which is not that rebellious.” He had no desire to act but was sent to the school theatre by a frustrated teacher as a punishment for “a series of things, you know – smoking, drinking and generally messing around”. “In the theatre, suddenly all the hierarchies of school were out the window.” The other attraction was that girls from a local school were involved in productions, “not because I was desperately lustful, although I’m sure I was, because I was a 13-year-old boy, but I just liked having girls around”.

Starting off behind the scenes, Dancy was soon cast as Ariel in The Tempest and found he “took to it naturally”.

When, at 23, he landed the lead in the television movie David Copperfield, Dancy was “quietly astonished that anybody was prepared to employ me.

“Comparisons are odious but also quite flattering,” he admits, smiling.

Naturally, the main attraction of America for Dancy is Danes, whom he met on the set of the 2007 film Evening.

They married two years later and are expecting a baby early next year. “But last year I got so hooked watching it once a week like everybody else that I told Claire to stop feeding me information beforehand.

“My job,” continues Dancy, who is wearing grey jeans and a V-neck navy sweater, “was to keep a completely straight face while a series of eminent actresses [including Georgie Glen and Gemma Jones] hopped up on this plinth and I reached my hand through a velvet 'modesty’ curtain onto a sand bag.

There were plenty of moments when we couldn’t hold it together.

Born and raised in New York, Danes has just been nominated for an Emmy for her role as CIA agent Carrie Mathieson in President Obama’s favourite television series, Homeland. This year I realised two things: firstly, that’s not a very effective way to have a relationship and secondly, if I’ve got the goods why shouldn’t I take advantage?