Hugh Dancy has spent a disproportionate amount of the past six months dressed in a frock coat. He's been filming for the forthcoming Andrew Davies adaptation of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and, as the eponymous hero, the jacket was something of a requirement. Most of the time he enjoyed wearing 'completely gorgeous costumes that were so far removed from normal life', but there was one problem. 'That stuff is seriously warm. A lot of the filming was done in Malta in the blazing sunshine where, in between takes, I stood under a huge parasol willing myself to stay cool. It's not like you can play one of literature's great heroes with massive sweat patches.'
But if ever there was a man born to deal with the sartorial challenges of period dramas, it has to be 27-year-old Dancy. His name is practically Darcy, for goodness sake, and even without the letter swap, he sounds like a romantic hero of Austenesque proportions. Then there's his look - a finely chiselled jawline topped off by a head of 19th-century curls and, finally, a precise, baritone voice which seems a bit too special for modern life. Small wonder he's being touted as the next Colin Firth.
But this time Dancy is staying cool. 'I should probably worry about the Colin Firth thing in terms of typecasting, but I can't get worked up about it. I've done Dickens (David Copperfield for the BBC), and now the George Eliot, but I've also done The Sleeping Dictionary set in the 1930s, and been a medic in Black Hawk Down. People have a tendency to lump everything together under the costume-drama label, because it's not immediately contemporary, but to me all those things are vastly different.'
He does, however, have a fondness for big texts and their big themes, which was handy in getting to grips with a serious tome like Eliot's Daniel Deronda. But he's at pains to point out that, unlike his father, a philosophy lecturer, academia is not his business. After his first BBC adaptation, Madame Bovary, was screened, he was momentarily phased to find himself fielding questions about which Flaubert translations he preferred. 'I mean, I'm an actor not a literary critic!' However, Dancy did choose to do English at Oxford instead of going to drama school, which he worried, 'would narrow everything down'. So, instead of voice workshops and fencing classes, he confined his acting experience to his English tutor's end-of-term plays about the birth of Europe constructed entirely in rhyming couplets. He admits it was an unusual grounding.
It was Linda La Plante's Trial & Retribution II which gave Dancy his big break five years ago. The pressure was on to learn a lot, and fast: 'I couldn't get my head round all the logistics of filming, the way they filled the courtroom with smoke and flapped it around. I thought I'd missed a bit in the script where the courtroom went on fire.' He also had to curb his natural inquisitiveness. 'It took me a while to accept that it wasn't my job or business to know about the lighting, and that I should stop suggesting camera angles. Someone gave me a pat on the head and told to me to carry on pretending for a living.'
So far, the 'pretending' is going pretty well. He's currently filming Ella Enchanted - a 21st-century fairy tale in which he, naturally, plays Prince Charming. There's also another Miramax film in the pipeline and, should Daniel Deronda reach Pride and Prejudice proportions, then he's already had a taste of popular adulation after appearing as Helen Baxendale's toyboy in Cold Feet. 'There hasn't exactly been an epidemic, but bizarrely a few blokes have come up and told me their girlfriends fancy me. It's difficult to come up with an appropriate reply to that. "Thanks, can I have her number?" I mean, what do you say?'
Suddenly, Hugh Dancy looks a bit sheepish. 'I feel a bit crap talking about all this stuff...' Before bouncing back: 'But then you can't pretend that it's normal and nothing to get overexcited about. It seems unlikely that anybody should be as lucky as I've been so far, but then I suppose somebody has to be, and it might as well be me.'
· Daniel Deronda will be shown from 23 November on BBC1
