Before Ioan Gruffudd’s first day at drama school, he had been told to wear something comfortable. He recalls walking towards the entrance of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), where his fellow students were waiting, “looking like Marlon Brando” in white T-shirts, cool jeans and leather jackets. Gruffudd was wearing a shellsuit. A Welsh football association shellsuit. “And I was a very young-looking 18-year-old,” he says. “Very patriotic, very fervently Welsh. I was a virgin as well. All the girls were like: ‘No, we’re not going to be the first, we can’t have this young kid falling in love with us.’” He laughs. “This is who I am.” This was also the unworldly, naive boy who almost joined a fundamentalist church around the same time, but more of that later.
The man who sits opposite me in a central London restaurant – despite being a successful, handsome actor with a much better-developed dress sense – seems to have retained enough of that endearing unaffectedness that I can perfectly picture him rustling through central London in head-to-toe polyester. In fact, there is a rare and touching openness about Gruffudd; he is perhaps the least guarded actor I’ve met.
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