Is there a harder hard man? A more dastardly villain? He incarnates SAS author Chris Ryan in the Sky series Strike Back, was Robin Hood's scowling nemesis Guy of Gisborne, and infamously revealed himself as a ruthless killer — not nice Lucas North but nasty John Bateman — in the most recent series of the BBC's Spooks. And now he's playing a cold-hearted Nazi infiltrator in the much anticipated whizz-bang film Captain America.
In person, Richard Armitage turns out to be the softest pussycat. Not to look at, of course. He's 6ft-something and mostly consists of granite and stubble. But the voice is on the quiet side, and he radiates an air of proper humility. So why is he never Mr Nice on screen?
"I suppose I'm a bit mean. My face on camera doesn't lend itself to happy nice guys. I think it's just that my bone structure looks menacing. I don't smile that often." He duly smiles, enchantingly, at the absurdity of the gap between image and reality. "Somebody asked me after I'd done all that training for Strike Back, ‘Could you go out and work with the SAS?' I thought, what a ridiculous question. It's about replicating a look." He even thinks he may qualify as a wimp.
A Teutonic assassin
In Captain America: The First Avenger, the latest cinematic take on a Marvel Comics superhero, Armitage is once more rotten to the core. He plays Heinz Kruger, a Teutonic assassin who at one point is involved in a super-macho underwater tussle. Only one problem. "I am just not a water baby. I can swim, but I just don't. Everyone else is jumping in and I'll go, ‘You know what? I'll just stand on the side.' I did four weeks of scuba training for the sequence and made myself do 50 lengths every day. Then we were at the bottom of a tank and there was 10 metres above you."
He shudders at the memory of the moment the divers confiscated his goggles and breathing line.
"They had put a microphone in the water so you could hear them say, ‘Just waiting for the bubbles to clear.' I'm at the bottom of the tank thinking, I've taken a deep breath, but I haven't got enough air. When they asked me to do it again, I was sitting in the dressing room crying, ‘I can't!'?"
In another scene, they put him in an empty box within a container filled with water. "They wanted to smash a window and the water to rush in quickly. They'd put all the safety things in place, but you can't fool the brain: you have a fight-or-flight mechanism that you can't control. I smashed the roof off."
Armitage's modest portrait of himself as the reluctant stuntman is slightly tarnished when he reveals that, to prepare for a scene in Spooks, he became one of the first people in the history of torture to volunteer for waterboarding.
"They put a wet cloth over your nostrils and your mouth, hold it tight and pour water into it. It's like suffocating underwater. I think I managed five seconds. I got the glimmer of something I could replicate: total terror, a certain sound, and the spasm the body does when you feel it."
The young Armitage, growing up eager to act, ran off to the circus in Budapest at the age of 19 to get his Equity card (proof of membership in an organisation of stage actors). It's a less than romantic memory.
"The best grounding it gave me was that I couldn't stoop any lower than sleeping next to an elephant and throwing a hula-hoop to a skateboarder. It was pretty grim. Two Russian guys taught me to do a back flip with two towels." Could he do one now, aged 39? "No way".
Understudied
After drama school he guessed his future was in theatre. Spear-carrying at the RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) cured him of that assumption. He understudied in one hatchet-faced tragedy that went on tour.
"We limped around, and I saw audiences being tortured by our production. That put me off. I'm not much of a show-off. I don't really go after that kind of applause."
Screen acting didn't go much better until one day he went into an audition for the BBC drama Sparkhouse in character as a grouchy Northern farmer.
"It came out of real frustration of not getting anything. Normally I'd go in with my hair all brushed and polished. It was the first time I've played a character over four episodes with an arc." But there's no getting round his physique. He got Strike Back, he says, because "somebody must have turned it down. I thought, this is your bog-standard boys-with-toys story. The challenge was to find the human interest inside a war machine story".
When Spooks came round, he'd not seen more than a few episodes of the first series. "They hadn't written the part. They wanted to bring in a character who had quite a complicated back story so they could then feed off that."
One day he'd like to have a go at ultimate baddie Richard III. For the next two years Armitage will be flying back and forth to New Zealand to play a dwarf in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit. Not a small dwarf, mind. "I'm carrying 20 kilos of costume and weights so I'm doing load of lower back and leg exercises."
Is that a drag for an actor keen to stay in touch with his inner softie?
"I want to be strong enough to cope with the roles, but I don't want to be cast as the guy that takes his shirt off. I'm looking forward to getting fat and old so I don't have to lift weights."
