Paul Bettany: 'Films were just better in the past'

Squaring an actor in the flesh with the person you've seen on screen is disorienting, but I'm having a particularly hard time with Paul Bettany. The man I've just been watching is a former boxer, broken in body and spirit after suffering a stroke. Pale and rheumy eyed, he spends much of Broken Lines cowed and meek, dabbing at the at the corner of his dribbling mouth before suddenly erupting into snarling, desperate rage. And now in front of me is this guy, tanned and animated and emanating enough warmth to power a fleet of electric cars.

"Oh, let me turn this off," he says, pocketing his iPhone as he shakes my hand. "Oh no, I shouldn't turn this off. Don't judge me," he pleads, "I have a very small baby. Do you have kids? They're great, great – the first three years they just scare the shit out of you."

We're in Tribeca in downtown Manhattan, a few blocks away from where Bettany lives with his wife of eight years, the actor Jennifer Connelly, and their two boys – one from Connelly's former marriage – and baby daughter. Agnes Lark was born in June and, naturally, Bettany is elated. But he's also riding high on the two films he's shot in the last couple of years. Broken Lines was, he says, "a lovely event really, because it was my best friend's [Dan Fredenburgh] movie. It was sort of delicious, like being a student – I turned up, worked relentlessly for seven days and then went home."

The other, Margin Call, is a drama with Stanley Tucci and Kevin Spacey about the last 24 hours of an investment bank trading floor. "The camaraderie and purity of intent was really edifying and both films really turned my head around: I've rekindled a love for making movies that had been made totally irrelevant by the complete, mad, romantic love you feel for your children. There comes a time when you realise you've subjugated all these personal, selfish desires. And I do need to express them. Which has been a real revelation for me as I turn 40 and hurtle towards my dotage. I won't bang on about it any more but I felt a sort of awakening." He raises his coffee cup and adds: "He said pretentiously, sipping his double espresso."

Bettany grew up in west London and at 19 enrolled at drama school. His desire to act, he says, came from "a childish instinct to make believe" paired with "a sort of revenge fantasy – [on] all the kids that had bullied me as a child". Eventually, he came to be motivated by a higher ideal: the hope that it could be "actually quite edifying".

"It's so embarrassing to talk about but there are some performances I've seen that have really moved me," he says. He compares them to "the way you'll hear a song or read a passage in a book that makes you somehow adhere a little more to the surface of the world as it spins. You feel like you won't fly off."

Bettany's own breakthrough performance came in 2000 with Gangster No 1, a brutal film carried by his disturbing performance as a coolly savage young mob man in 1960s London. In the years after that he maintained a reputation as a scene-stealing secondary character: an ebullient Chaucer in A Knight's Tale; Russell Crowe's loyal roommate in A Beautiful Mind. His career has since taken in the extremes of leading man – at one end the eminently likable former tennis champion in 2004's shiny romcom Wimbledon, and at the other, and in the same year, his performance as Tom Edison in Lars von Trier's singular Dogville. That, he says, "was a hideous experience".

"I did it because Stellan fucking Skarsgård fibbed to me! He said, 'You gotta turn up, it'll be fantastic, it's like a party all the time.' And after three weeks and not one bit of fun, I said, 'Stellan, what were you talking about?' And he said, 'Man, I was making it up – I just couldn't face doing it without you.'"

He mimes murderous exasperation. "I found it a peculiarly unsatisfying experience because [Von Trier] has no interest in you being any part of the cerebral process with him. You're absolutely his puppet. But no, I don't want to be too down on Lars. He is extraordinary and he is a sensation."

Nonetheless, he has purposely never watched the film. "Everyone's really shocked about my not having seen that one because it's a work of art or whatever, but there's a bunch of my movies I haven't seen. I've seen a few, or you see [one of them] at a premiere." He tightens his mouth into an acid little grimace. "A delicious experience."

But he'll just about concede that "with a favouring wind and a good script, sometimes I have the feeling I can … move. It's a very difficult thing to talk about elegantly. I think my greatest strength is that I don't see acting as a sport. I mean: there are different sorts of actors and some are on set with you and it's a competition. There is a certain frisson that can be generated from that, but I don't think you can ever become more than your separate parts. When you are yielding to the idea that what is moving is the thing created between you, you can become better than you would ever be in competition with each other. I worked with Vincent Cassel once and he was so powerful. You really felt somebody connected with you, which happens rarely – somebody really looking at you and really wanting to change your face."

At this point he does just that and it's like CGI happening inches from my nose. His entire physiognomy transforms, the icy blue eyes intensify into laser mode and he stares, motionless. It's completely terrifying. Now I can see why this charming man has played so many psychopaths. Slightly harder to understand, though, are the action roles: the Uzi-wielding archangel in Legion or the vampire-slaying clergyman in Priest.

"Listen," he says good-naturedly, "I've made some bad movies, but some of those bad movies have been other people's dreams, so it would be sort of inelegant to tread on all that. I've made movies because I've thought, 'God, I really want my kids to have a house in the country.' It's depressing, not being in charge of one's destiny. So what you have the power to do as an actor is the power to say 'no'. You don't have the power to say 'yes'."

Does this mean no more action films then? After a slow, appraising nod he says, with comic astonishment, "I think it might mean no more action films! I mean, I love action movies, I love all sorts of movies, but there are just too many of the fuckers and too few movies for grownups. Action movies are incredibly vain. You get all fit and feel more stupid with every push-up." In illustration, he mimes a pair of scales with his palms and frowns at his descending right hand – "reading less, reading less, reading less" – and then at his ascending left – "better abs, better abs, better abs".

"It's hard," he says, "to do sit-ups and read Remembrance of Things Past."

But probably not as hard as negotiating two different filming schedules, across various continents, with three kids. He looks pained. "It's so weird, so difficult and occasionally heartbreaking. I have a rule that we'll never go more than two weeks without seeing each other."

I tell him I've read descriptions of his relationship as the strongest marriage in Hollywood. "Oh my fucking God!" he says. "Really? Well, the thing is, we've been married for eight years, which is like 50 years in Hollywood years. So I suppose it suddenly becomes really intriguing – 'How do they do it!' I loathe the movie business. I love making films but I loathe the business. And it sounds so sort of mealy-mouthed: I've made a career in the film business, I've made money out of the film business, it's been really good to me. But it's kind of repulsive. And I hate to be one of those actors moaning about how films were better in the past, but fuck me, films were just better in the past. Know what I mean? The 70s – fuck!"

He may despair over the fact that his kids have Twilight when he had Harold and Maude, but these are enriching times for him personally, if not culturally. Things are "percolating", he says, admitting to writing and directorial ambitions.

"It's a really exciting time. I think, 'Oh God, I've been asleep!' A 'renaissance', I blushingly say! Yeah, we'll see."