STEWART GRASPS LIFE ON SCREEN We’ve lost so many actors.. death is always on my mind

I do. Four weeks after graduating from drama school I didn’t have any work. “Everybody seemed in my year to have an agent or a job but I had got nothing. “I signed on at the labour exchange in Dewsbury in the West Riding of Yorkshire and said, ‘My career is over and it hasn’t even started yet.’

Loved

“Then I got an offer from a repertory company to join them in the Theatre Royal in Lincoln. It was weekly. Rep was still weekly in those days. So every Monday morning we did a new play, a complete new production. And I loved it.

“I didn’t have much to do. I played small roles but I loved the constant transformations into something new. So I am always looking for a different sort of challenge.” Starring in the final Wolverine film Logan with Hugh Jackman, the Yorkshireman plays dementia sufferer Prof Charles Xavier. He admits that he did worry about being typecast as an old man after the role. “There might have been moments before Logan when I thought, ‘If I do this and I really go for it, am I only going to get cast as geriatrics from now on?’ I am not quite there yet,” he adds with a laugh.

“Will people say, ‘Oh, no, we can’t have him playing a healthy, fit individual. He is just too weak and frail and old.’ But screw it! It was so much fun. This role intrigued me and as it so happened I was already preparing for a stage role that I did with Ian McKellen in which I was playing a man not only with alcoholism but also with brain degeneration as well. I was already doing research into that.

“I had met and talked with the great, now-departed, Oliver Sacks about this.

“I consulted Oliver several times about roles and he was always wonderfully helpful.

“Then when I met James Mangold and found that he too really wanted to push into the depths of Charles’s distress and despair and confusion and anger and fury – as well as his unpredictability – I was all for it.

“And I enjoyed every aspect, particularly given that I was going to be sharing almost all of my time with Hugh.”

LOGAN is available on Blu-ray and DVD tomorrow from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.