‘I have a terrible reputation. I’m just too intense’

Aaron Eckhart doesn’t believe you need friends to be a good actor. Lucky for him, says Gaby Wood

Imeet Aaron Eckhart in London, early on a Saturday evening. He is dressed in a dinner jacket and a straight black satin tie for a secret assignation with Bafta. “I had it pressed for this,” he jokes. The suit is slim but not skinny, an important distinction for Eckhart, who, though so chiselled he could probably be used as a weapon, describes himself as “just an older man”, determined to “take the sexuality out of it”. (He is 48.) “Which is interesting in this business,” he adds, “because they try to sexualise everything. You know, all the suits are rail-thin and they’re tight and I’m like: You guys! What are we trying to accomplish here?”

If you think that’s oversharing, it’s nothing. Within five minutes, Eckhart has told me that for his new film, Bleed for This, in which he plays the washed-up boxing coach Kevin Rooney, he put on 40lbs, bought huge trousers but never buttoned them up, and shot the whole film “with poison oak all over my backside”. “Why are we talking about this?” he says, as if to himself. Then he goes on.

“Three months before this movie started, I circled the day on the calendar and said: I’m gonna put away the arugula salad and I’m gonna go for pizzas and banana splits.” The weight gain led to a great deal of discomfort, he confides. On one occasion, his girlfriend – well, he says, qualifying that instantly, she’s not his girlfriend, she’s “undetermined”– who is a professional triathlete he won’t name, and who valiantly put up with his pot belly, came to visit him on Long Island where Bleed for This was shot. “We went for a walk, and I said: ‘Babe, I have to stop, because I’m chafing’.” Eckhart laughs. “That’s not an attractive story. But it’s the truth, OK?”

People who’ve seen Bleed for This all seem to emerge from the cinema with the same question: how long did it take you to realise Kevin Rooney was Eckhart? We first see him slumped on a floor in a stupor, and when roused, he moves so lethargically, and slouches so heavily over his enormous stomach that it’s impossible to tell who the actor is. Even after he finally lifts his bald head it’s not clear. Rooney is so far from the sort of alpha male role Eckhart would seem to be cut out for that even if you know he’s in the film, you assume he must be playing another part. Ben Younger, the director, gave an early screening to Steven Soderbergh, who directed Eckhart in Erin Brockovich, and, Eckhart tells me, “10 minutes after I had entered the film Steven said: ‘Who is that guy?’”

The film, which might appear to be about Miles Teller’s character, the boxer Vinny Pazienza, is at its best when it’s about the relationship between the two of them. Rooney, who in real life had just been fired by Mike Tyson, went into decline (as did Tyson, who lost his first professional fight 18 months later). Pazienza hired him to orchestrate his comeback – but the idea had been cooked up by promoters who thought this was a simple way of putting both men out to pasture. In Bleed for This, Rooney trains and nurses Pazienza, not as the tough guy of sporting lore, but as a canny outsider who favours honesty and kindness to oneself. Eckhart makes him seem almost maternal.

Rooney is one of two roles that will put Eckhart back in cinemas next month – the other is as co-pilot to Tom Hanks in Sully, a film about Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who safely landed a defective plane on the Hudson river. Both are not only supporting roles, but supportive ones. He is strikingly good in both. “My job is to help define our hero,” Eckhart says. “How I look at Vinny determines how the audience will feel about Vinny. I think actors need to revisit that lesson. It’s not about me.”

Why isn’t Eckhart more famous? Looking back at his performances over the past 20 years – as Chad, the sick joker in Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men, as Julia Roberts’s biker boyfriend in Erin Brockovich, as the slick tobacco lobbyist or “yuppie Mephistopheles” in Thank You for Smoking, as the disfigured district attorney who backs Batman in The Dark Knight – it seems more and more puzzling that he should have received relatively little praise.

Granted, Eckhart’s hit rate hasn’t

‘I said, “Babe, I have to stop, I’m chafing”’ ‘If I told you what I really want in a woman, I’d be judged for it’