A word to the Wise

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Greg Wise preferred to rebuild his house than chase a glittering career in the United States

Emma Thompson married Greg Wise after her split from her long-term love, Kenneth Branagh

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Greg Wise is such a good-looking man that it is hard not to react to that when you meet him. I spend a proportion of the interview giggling at inappropriate moments and twiddling my hair. Most odd behaviour. Not that Wise is a flirt - far from it. "I've been with my wife for 12 years!" he says, when I ask if women approach him often.

His wife, as we all know, is the award-winning actress/writer/director Emma Thompson. They met on the set of Sense and Sensibility when she was in the miserable process of splitting up with her then husband and long-term love, Kenneth Branagh, and Wise was - well, what was Wise doing? "I was just being there doing my job," he says, simply.

Actually, little about Greg Wise is that simple. He is married to an icon and yet he claims not to feel overshadowed by her. "She does her thing and I do mine," he says. He's an actor who doesn't really think he is one.

"I don't think that's what I do, really," he says, and he's invariably caricatured as being a stay-at-home dad to six-year-old daughter Gaia while his more famous partner goes out to work. "It's not like that at all," he says. "Any woman knows that it takes two people to be a good parent. Now that Gaia is getting to the make-up and clothes bit I'm slightly more dispensable than I used to be."

But back to his looks. Are they a blessing or a problem? Wise looks puzzled. "What do you mean?" he says, now almost worried. Doesn't he tend to get typecast, I say. "Oh, I see," he says. "Yes, I've been offered lots of roles as psychotic baddies or, more often, a dashing but caddish man who rides horses and wears breeches." This is probably and primarily because of his success in Sense and Sensibility all those years ago and because of his classic looks.

He is tall, at 6ft 1in, and has very dark, short hair that is, now he has hit 40, greying at the temples. We are in the Langham hotel in central London - ie pretty grand - and yet Wise turns up as if he's just gone for a stroll in the English countryside. He is wearing jeans and clunky walking boots and a large cuddly grey flecked sweater. He is also sporting an impressive tan. "The wife and I have just got back from the Seychelles," he says. The Thompson-Wises have been on Fregate Island, a luxurious, almost-private idyll where you potter around on your own golf buggies. "Gaia loved it," he says. "We all loved it."

But we are not here to discuss holidays. We are here to talk about his role on BBC4 tonight as an academic called Anderson, who gets into lots of trouble in Number 13, a made-for-TV adaptation of the MR James classic ghost story. "I loved doing it," he says, "because I love a good ghost story and Emma has always said how much she enjoys MR James stories, so the opportunity came up.

"The shoot was just outside London and we did it all in eight days so it was hard work but over quickly." He says he likes doing quick jobs because it means he can plan his life around his work rather efficiently. "I'm trying to do different roles now," he says. "I've never played an academic before and Anderson is a buttonedup man who lives in his mind. After him, I've just played a very sporty person for a Miss Marple episode."

Yet this is the most work Wise has done for years. He is almost as famous for doing hardly any acting as he is for being an actor. He is, I suggest, either famously choosy or so fabulously well-off that he doesn't feel the need to work. After Sense and Sensibility, in which he played Willoughby to much acclaim, he was expected to be the Next Big Thing but it didn't happen. Why not? "Now you're thinking that I met Emma and then fell in love and somehow no longer felt the need to work, aren't you?" he says. I nod my head. "Ah, but that's not true," he says. "How do I explain this? I don't have any labels for myself, really. Sometimes, when I am out with my wife, I am just Mr Thompson. Or at my daughter's school, I'm Gaia's dad. I don't think of myself as Greg Wise, actor."

He also says that after his original success he went to LA and was rather feted. "There was lots of wining and dining and projects on offer but a lot of the ones I chose fell through. I kept saying things like, 'I'm not really interested in working in America', which was like committing ritual suicide. I went back to our house and spent nine months rebuilding it."

He rebuilt his own house? "I'm a trained architect," he says. "Both my parents were architects. My father was a professor and he always wanted me to have a proper qualification as he saw it so I studied that at university in Edinburgh. I still really enjoy it." He says he loved ripping the back off the house and putting it back together again.

"It was just me and another builder and I was very happy. It's rather inspiring to see progress at the end of every day. It was a grounding experience." Sometimes, he says, he thinks of himself more as an architect than an actor. "I haven't done enough acting to be called one," he says. So why did he become one? "I got the bug at Edinburgh. I loved the fringe and there were so many plays going on." He ended up studying acting at Glasgow and his first job was in an old-style, slapstick musical. "I'd been doing Ibsen and Chekov at college so it was an odd experience but I loved it. It was exciting to get paid to entertain people. I think that's your job as an actor, to entertain."

But the impression I get is that he is still very ambivalent about his chosen profession. Two years after he finished building the house, he went back to the US to sort out some work. "It was almost disastrous," he says. "I was last year's news. Everyone was looking for the new thing, or the carbon copy of the new thing, and I was no longer new." So he came back to London and he and Thompson had Gaia and he stayed pretty much at home. "It was what I wanted to do," he says. "You have to commit to children. That's how I see it. I was happy to do it and my wife and I have shared it, depending on what else was going on in our lives."

At the time Thompson and Wise got together, there was lots of hoo-ha in the press about the fact that Thompson and Branagh had split and that she had taken up with another man. "We had paparazzi in the garden," he says, "but we're an old-style married couple now so it's all quietened down."

Yet from her mid-forties, Thompson has started to shine in a way she hadn't before. Now, I say, she's the Queen on the Red Carpet. "She looks good, doesn't she?" he says. "It's not that serious. Everyone comments on it but I think she decided that as everyone else seemed to have fun wearing long glamorous gowns and having big hair, she'd have a go at it, too." But she looks sensational! "Yes, it's a laugh for her. It's something she's come to later on in life."

Much has been made of the couple's age gap. She is seven years older than him, and met him when she was in her late thirties. They tried for a baby and conceived Gaia but couldn't have another. "It wasn't possible," says Wise, simply. Both have talked in the past of how they tried endless IVF to no avail. Three years ago, Wise said the cycle of trying to get pregnant and failing was so heart-rending that it left him seeking psychological help. "It was brutal," he said at the time. Now he says he has come to terms with it.

"Of course we would have liked more," he says, "but it didn't happen so you look at the advantages of having one child. We are more flexible. Gaia is more flexible. We have a lot of time for each other."

But the couple also have Tindy in their lives. He is a 20-year-old Rwandan refugee they have virtually adopted. "We met him through the refugee council," says Wise, "and he'd been through a very hard time in the war in Rwanda. His father had died of Aids and his mother and sisters were listed as missing by the Red Cross. He gradually started spending more time with us. Now he is a member of the family. He was sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square but now he is at college in Cambridge reading social and political sciences, so he has done very well."

He says Gaia is delighted to have an older brother. "Tindy went to speak to Gaia's school, not about the genocide, obviously, but about life in Rwanda." Wise is very keen on promoting this type of thing. He has forged connections with a poor, rural primary school in Uganda that needed help.

"I was there for a charity and found that everywhere you threw a stone was a school needing help. You have to be quite blinkered about Africa sometimes." The children of Gaia's school raised enough money to buy a new dormitory for the children in the Ugandan school by doing a sponsored skip and now they all write to each other.

"I think there is some commonality about them all being children. Yes, their lives couldn't be more different but they are all children and they share more common experiences than you would think."

He's very keen that other schools should follow suit. " I think it is good for Gaia to get some experience of not having everything we have. We try to keep it simple. We cycle everywhere and we've only just bought a small television and only have the main channels." In the holidays, they disappear off to their cottage in Scotland and live a simple, rural life.

Do they work together? I imagine Wise and Thompson discussing projects round the dinner table. "No, we don't," he laughs. "We do our own thing. If one of us is stuck, we'll ask the other one but we tend to keep it separate."

It is time to go now, and I say there is one more thing I'd like to ask him. In the past, he seems to have been prone to depression. In many interviews he questions the meaning of life, that type of thing. Is he a depressive? "No," he says, "but I like a life in balance. I have never actively pursued my career because it would make me insecure because it is an insecure profession. I like to act but I also like to make documentaries and work on different projects. I owe it to those around me to keep sane. We all do."

• Number 13 is on BBC4 tonight at 10.30pm

GREG WISE'S LONDON

What theatre have you seen lately? The Glass Room at Hampstead Theatre, by Ryan Craig. And the Monty Python musical, Spamalot, is outrageously funny.

What's your favourite restaurant? Two Brydges Place, off Charing Cross Road. It's a private members' club which isn't swanky. I love its rickety charm and its unfussy food.

What's on your i-Pod? Oh, just a load of old rubbish.

What are you reading? Ben Elton's Chart Throb.

Where would you love to live in London? West Hampstead, where we live now. The neighbourhood has a great community feel to it and we live virtually opposite Emma's mother, Phillida Law, so we always go back and forth on our bikes.

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