Encounter - Simon Russell Beale's Macbeth has been both celebrated and slammed. He talks to Michael Coveney about this and future roles

Alongside Macbeth himself, you can sup full with horrors in Islington these days, and I am not referring to the unpredictable restaurants or the company you might keep in them. The new production of Shakespeare's nightmarish tragedy is explicitly placed in the mind of its great interpreter, Simon Russell Beale, who has confounded expectation yet again in an unlikely role.

A podgy Macbeth? A far cry indeed from Edmund Kean's "great famished wolf", Nicol Williamson's bitter beanpole or, indeed, Ian McKellen's languid, sensual destroyer. But Russell Beale has also played a Hamlet who was for once, as the duel scene suggests, "fat and scant of breath". He simply binds the meaning to himself and spits it out anew.

I caught him in the bar after a performance and said I'd like to talk to him about a few things. Three days later, just after teatime, he welcomed me in north London's Almeida Theatre with a cup of coffee and we sat in the deserted auditorium.

"I love this theatre. It's perfect. I can see every face in the house. In Shakespeare, how you meet the audience is so important. As Iago, I'm going to do this, I said to myself, and I don't give a fairy's fart what you think. But Macbeth is never not frightened. And he really goes so far beyond the pale. So I'm always terrified of what the audience might do to me."

He leaps on to the stage and demonstrates the power points, the embrace, of this magical space. I comment on the atmosphere of John Caird's gripping production, its sounds and shrieks in the night, its interesting use of the witches and the children as both premonitions and victims of his campaign of reckless violence.

Russell Beale's conspicuous intelligence is part of his acting, but the genius of it resides in a rare ability to give perfect clarity to the complex processes of thought. In this respect, he is the new John Gielgud. "The more I do," he confides, "the more obsessed I am with the notion that the thought comes first. Emotion and verse-speaking can follow from that." And he demonstrates a simple decision to turn his hands outwards to the audience, not inwards to his own face. "That is a proactive way of making the question 'What hands are these?' transferable to the audience, shared with them," he says.

"I've never known a play so obsessed with the senses. Macbeth goes through life with his eyes shut. There are bird sounds, and knocking sounds, and strange visions." Most strikingly, and unprecedentedly in the history of the play's performance (I believe), he turns up at the murder of Lady Macduff and her children, deep in Act Four. "As a professional killer, he's fascinated to see the face of someone dying. Also, to see the reaction of a mother to the murder of her children." As the victims are dragged off, the poet-soldier turns to the audience with an utterly blank expression. No more words: the interval. It is a stunning moment. Russell Beale sees this leading directly to his final great soliloquies, which are delivered with the bleak, weary nihilism more readily associated with Samuel Beckett than the Bard.

"Don't ask me all the usual rubbish," Russell Beale had blurted out. By this he means: does he still hate his own appearance (he doesn't) and did he mind terribly when a critic said that his Richard III resembled the unhappy result of a one-night stand between Pere Ubu and Gertrude Stein (he didn't)?

Now 44 years old, an associate of the National, the RSC and the Almeida, and a CBE, the actor is almost happy in his own skin, gregarious and solitary at the same time, addicted to crosswords and living in Pimlico. He loves swimming and does a lot of walking. "But the truth is, I am what I am, and I'm only as comparatively fit as I am because of the work. If I wasn't doing this job, I'd be as big as a house."

Russell Beale was born in Malaya. His father was surgeon-general to the British army, his mother (who died shortly before he played his grieving, mother-fixated Hamlet five years ago) a GP. He was a chorister at St Paul's Cathedral School, going on to Cambridge University (he got a First in English) and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

With his great friend and mentor Sam Mendes directing, he played Thersites in Troilus and Cressida; a blithely satanic Richard III; a superb, corporeal Ariel (spitting in Prospero's face); and, three years ago, an amazing Donmar Warehouse double of Uncle Vanya and Mal-volio. His Malvolio was extraordinary, breaking up the revels in an Ena Sharples hairnet and enacting the letter-reading scene not, as usual, in the garden, but as a masturbatory fantasy in his own bedroom; he ended up humiliated and blindfolded like one of Goya's prisoners of war.

After Macbeth, he challenges expectation once more by playing Cassius in Deborah Warner's Barbican-originated European tour of Julius Caesar (with Ralph Fiennes as Mark Antony and Paul Rhys as Brutus). So what of Cassius's "lean and hungry look"? Old Caesar will obviously be suffering failing vision as well as delusions of political adequacy. And then there is Leontes in The Winter's Tale, and possibly Richard II at Stratford in Ontario and, almost definitely, Falstaff for Mendes in about five years' time.

The actor must now leave his own auditorium to smoke and to "warm up" for this evening's show. How does he do this? "I do the whole play, very quickly, all my own lines, skipping the others. I've never found any other way of preparing for a performance. I know it's a bit sad." Suddenly, a blast of Motown fills the theatre. The technicians are at work. "I like that," guffaws Russell Beale. "People must have complained and demanded a bit more . . . zip!" Forget the three witches; tonight, Macbeth meets the Three Degrees.

Macbeth runs at the Almeida Theatre, London N1 (020 7359 4404) to 5 March

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