I was in Shakespeare In Love with Julia Roberts, until that fell apart. So I've been close lots of times, but I think it's been the making of me as an actor." He pauses. "Well, I have to think something, don't I?" "Yes, years of compromise and disappointment have added depth to my acting." He lets out a big laugh. If Sewell is bored of being asked why he isn't a bigger star, he's far too polite to say so. In fact, he's disarmingly honest about his stop-start career. "For a long time, I've had to hustle," he admits. "If a film role is obviously great, then it's been difficult for me to get a look-in." Instead, he says, he has to "kind of trick my way into supporting roles". His recent cameo as the demented Reverend Duchemin in BBC2's Parade's End is one such example. "I'd never have been anywhere near it were it not for my personal relationship with Tom Stoppard," he says (Stoppard adapted Ford Maddox Ford's books for the screen). He takes a gulp of his latte and cracks his knuckles, like one of the many villains he got stuck playing after 2001's A Knight's Tale. For years, Sewell was rarely off horseback. Casting agents, he says, "thought I was what I looked like, which was a curly-haired… whatever". "If there was a list of people getting picked, I wasn't on it." He's 45 now. The black curls have been cut short, and his cheekbones are sharper. He is currently on stage in Pinter's Old Times, and starring in film thriller All Things To All Men.
Yet a feeling lingers that Sewell has not yet shown all he's capable of. "People never knew what to do with me," he says.
"I was neither one thing or another." By which I think he means he was too handsome to play character roles and not pretty enough to be a romantic lead. And that, he says, goes all the way back to his days at Central School Of Speech & Drama. "There were a chosen few, and I wasn't one of them.
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