Lucky Man's James Nesbitt interview: I'm a Northern Irish superhero in a Stan Lee vehicle

Despite being the star of one such drama, James Nesbitt says that he doesn't actually like superhero fantasies. “It's a genre I've never been drawn to”, he admits when we meet in the offices of the production company behind Sky1's biggest drama hit to date, Stan Lee's Lucky Man, in which he plays a gambling-addicted London murder detective who is granted the ability to control luck. It's a superpower that might be thought to appeal to the racehorse-owning Northern Irish actor, but no: “It's something I was never really interested in”, he reiterates.

Nesbitt's involvement, it seems, is all down to timing. He had just finished the first series of The Missing, the BBC1 drama in which he played the distraught father of a boy who vanishes while the family is on holiday in France, and decided he needed something less draining.

“I know f*** all about Stan Lee, but kind of went with it”, he says “Also the idea of being a Northern Irish superhero in a Stan Lee vehicle, and at times being able to throw in my own Northern Irishness. As the director said to me the other day, ‘how many Stan Lee super-heroes get to say 'what are you doing you f*** eejits?’”.

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Anyway, he's pleased with the show's success, and responsive to fans' warmth, promising interesting new angles in the second series. “We really decided to embrace fully that whole fantastic super-hero world – I think it's really stepped up and gets better and better”.

Since his big break in Cold Feet in 1998, playing the womanising Adam Williams, Nesbitt’s has become an unexpectedly versatile screen actor, either in deeply serious dramas about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, such as Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday and Guy Hibbert's Five Minutes to Heaven, as the lead in more genre fare like Murphy's Law (in which he played an undercover policeman with a very Village People moustache) and Munro (as a brain surgeon), or more idiosyncratic productions like Danny Boyle's Babylon and Peter Bowker's Occupation, in which he portrayed a British soldier during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Despite this, in a review of another Bowker production, The Miller's Tale in BBC1's 2003 adaptation of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the late AA Gill called Nesbitt a “lazy actor”.

“I actually felt his review was very lazy”, says Nesbitt. “It was a really good production. There may have been quite a few jobs when I haven't been very good, but very few when I've been lazy.”

He eventually got to know Gill “quite well”, he says, but not before Nesbitt managed to take revenge of sorts when he was filming Murphy's Law in Brick Lane in the the East End of London, and took the art department for a lunchtime curry. “I suddenly saw AA Gill walk past and look at the menu and he was clearly coming to review it for the Times”, he says. “And as he walked in I stood up and said 'OK, time for Britain's laziest actor to get back to work'.

“I used to take umbrage often with journalists”, he admits. “A Time Out journalist once described my acting as 'smug and annoying' and I sent him a postcard from Mauritius saying 'I'm here and you're not... how's that for smug and annoying?'.”

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And as the rest of Britain shivers and sneezes its way through a particularly gloomy February, some might find Nesbitt's itinerary for the month – if not smug and annoying, then possibly enviable and decidedly bachelor-like: watching boxing in Las Vegas, playing golf in Palm Springs, heading back in Northern Ireland to hang out with his lifelong male friends, and then “going away with my girls at half-term”.

The “girls” are his teenage daughters Peggy (aged 19 and studying psychology at Bristol University) and 14-year-old Mary – his children with former actress Sonia Forbes-Adam. Their marriage was shaken but not destroyed in 2002 by tabloid allegations of multiple affairs, Nesbitt promising to “take a long and considered look at himself”, but the couple finally separated last October, claiming that infidelity was not one of the reasons. In what he calls a “very modern arrangement”, Nesbitt has now bought a house nearby the family home in south London, all them spending last Christmas together.

Later this month, filming begins again in Manchester for the latest series of Cold Feet, writer Mike Bullen's much-loved relationship comedy-drama first resurrected last year amidst the misgivings of its reunited cast. “There was a lot of trepidation beforehand”, says Nesbitt. “It had been mooted to come back for many years, and we were either too busy, or I thought 'what's the point?' But when eventually my agent phoned and said 'Look... just look at the script', I read it and it was funny.

“We hadn't seen each other in a while”, he says of being reunited at the first read-through with John Thomson, Fay Ripley, Hermione Norris and Robert Bathurst. “I honestly hadn't seen Hermione in probably 11 or 12 years, the same with Robert”, says Nesbitt. “And Fay and John I had maybe seen once. I think people's notion is that you're friends for life, whereas the nature of my job is that you get very close for a period of time and then you just move on.

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“Even at the read-through we were a bit scared”, he continues. “How are we going to get on? What's it going to be like? But it's probably the happiest we've ever been. Now the idea that we're starting again is exciting, although I haven't seen the scripts yet.”

The original series of Cold Feet came at the end of a first decade as a professional actor when Nesbitt had struggled to make a name for himself with guest roles in hit TV shows of the 1990s like Ballykissangel, Lovejoy, Soldier Soldier and Between the Lines. The son of a headmaster whose primary school Nesbitt himself attended in Ballymena, County Antrim, he originally planned to become a teacher before dropping out of a French degree at the University of Ulster (where he now occupies the ceremonial role of Chancellor).

And while the Troubles have provided the 52-year-old actor with some of his most challenging roles and impressive performances, his boyhood was largely unaffected by the sectarian strife. “You could grow up 30 miles from relative hotspots and live in relative peace”, he says. “I grew up in a protestant background but I co-existed very easily with Catholics, and certainly I was one of that generation who was more interested in falling in love and partying. The bars of south Belfast were more important to me than Stormont, Westminster and Dublin.

“Bloody Sunday [the 2002 drama in which Nesbitt played the politician who organised the 1972 civil rights march through Derry during which 14 protesters were killed by British paratroopers] really shook all that up when I begun to look at where I'd come from.”

Not that the young Nesbitt was totally immune to the violence. “My dad went to Balmeda town hall to pay the tax or something”, he recalls. “And my sister and I were asleep in the car and we woke up and there was great pandemonium around us and the caretaker grabbed us and said 'get out... there's a bomb'. And there was a bomb – and it was in the car beside our car.”

His father proved supportive, or at least proactive, when Nesbitt left university prematurely and announced that he wanted to become an actor, persuading him that he needed to travel to London for his drama schooling. The reaction of his English peers was, he says, confusing. “It was complicated for me because I was from a Protestant area. Either people from outside the drama school were thinking I was a “Paddy”, but then I'd go into drama school and all the young students were all 'Oh yeah...Brits out!'.”

His role model among Northern Irish actors was Adrian Dunbar, with whom he made the 1998 award-winning movie Hear My Song, while he only met Liam Neeson ten years ago, despite growing up in the same town. “The first thing Liam said to me when I met him was 'was your granny Granny Nesbitt?' and I said 'Of course she was'... He remembered her very well. Liam's always bloody working, he works harder than me.”

Nesbitt has a house in County Antrim, and visits regularly. I wondered how people in Northern Ireland were feeling following the Brexit vote. “I think there are concerns about what can happen at the border but I think the will is there for things to be managed as smoothly as possible”, he says. “There's still something that could be called 'postwar optimism'... it's a good time to be there.”

In the meantime Nesbitt travels around London by bus and underground, accepting the recognition with good grace. “The hard truth is that most people know who I am, and I think you have to embrace it”, he says. “I remember when my daughter Peggy was about two and a half and we were walking the street, and someone stopped me to get an autograph, and she had seen that happen before and she suddenly went, 'Ah... they know you but you don't know them'. And that's more or less it, really”.

‘Stan Lee's Lucky Man’ returns to Sky1 at 9pm on 24 February