You expect Aaron Eckhart to slither on to the screen. He's good at that. He is quite a master at playing the morally ambiguous, the victim, the torturer, the also-ran. He excels in creating discomfort. You wonder that he might be extremely uncomfortable with himself. Where does he put all these edges? Where do they come from?
I remember shuddering when I saw him play Chad in Neil LaBute's debut In The Company of Men, an angry young marketing executive who flirts, seduces and dumps a deaf secretary just because he can. He masturbated on screen for LaBute's Your Friends and Neighbours while his wife had an affair. He was Julia Roberts's beardy biker lover in Erin Brockovich, Gwyneth Paltrow's wimpy lover in Possession, and last year was dazzlingly amoral as a lobbyist defending the rights of smokers in Thank You For Smoking. In that he had a particular vulpine smile. He would say something terrible and ridiculous and then beam. I read that Tony Blair inspired that grin. So it came as something of a surprise that he was to play the romantic lead in Scott Hicks's thoughtful comedy-drama No Reservations (opposite Catherine Zeta-Jones). Hicks brought us Shine and was nominated for an Oscar for his hypersensitive direction.
No Reservations is set in the high-powered, high-stressed world of the celebrity chef. Zeta-Jones plays Kate, a top chef who is driven and compulsive and whose life is worth less than her saffron sauce. Then her life suddenly changes and Eckhart as the sous chef brings passion, emotion, sweetness - not anything you'd previously associate with him. But from the moment you see him sitting in his kitchen singing along to 'Nessun Dorma' it feels right, you are charmed by him. He has a different smile, wide and beatific. It's a rock star smile. It's a confident smile. It fits his face rather than his face fitting it. It's a romantic leading man performed as exquisitely as all of the bad boys.
He is smiling again when we meet at a cooking school in Rome. A slightly more cautious smile but charming nonetheless. He is tall and lithe. His hair is a pleasant dirty blond and his eyes have an implausible twinkle. What was going on within Eckhart that made him fit so well as the romantic comedy hero?
'Hm?' he says leaning forward. 'Even when I had success playing complicated, morally ambivalent characters I got offered romantic comedy, I just didn't do them. I didn't think I had any talent in that area. I always enjoyed watching them, from Cary Grant to Robert Redford. Maybe I just grew up and thought I want to try it at least.'
For Eckhart, being unequivocally charming on screen was way outside the comfort zone. 'You know there's every reason you give yourself not to do it, to be the wallflower, to say I'm too shy, to give yourself every reason to not get the girl,' he says.
You can see this working with the arc of his own life. He's 39 and has always complained he wanted to settle down, have children, but always became claustrophobic. Now without much suffering he can actually say his girlfriend's name. 'It's Ashley.' But more of her later.
'When I did Thank You For Smoking I know people came out of the cinema and they were happy. They laughed and it made me feel happy and I felt I'll try and do that again. I hope they feel the same way about this movie.'
In 1998 when In The Company of Men came out women approached in the street and slapped him. That can't have been fun. 'No, you're right, it wasn't. But that was a long time ago. Thank You For Smoking was the first movie I felt I was - how shall I say this - nicely accepted.'
After Smoking, he did a small movie called Conversations With Other Women with Helena Bonham Carter. 'The thing is I want to do movies for adults about adults, relationship movies. I think there was a switch in me that went on. I'm not a kid any more. Yep, I want to get the girl. I don't want to be known as the bad guy.'
And was it like that in real life? Did you want to be the insider, accepted, not alienated? 'Well I've changed my life for sure, there's no doubt about it. I've quit drinking. I've quit smoking. And I don't think I was the best person when I was drinking.' As he grew up with a Mormon background, guilt was always part of the drinking. He says it made him aggressive, he got into fights. He managed to stop both by hypnosis. 'I never thought I could give up smoking. Do you know both were impossible to give up, but neither of them was hard. Right now, if you asked me which one would I rather do, I wouldn't want to do either. I smoked when I got up and I smoked when I went to bed. Now I have a cup of coffee in the mornings I feel better, cleaner, and I think I'm a friendlier person.'
Do you think alcohol was making you a morally ambivalent person? 'I think I was trying to make my way and work out my own philosophy. Drinking was a way to cover up some insecurities and I figured I didn't need it any more. I didn't use the hypnosis as therapy. It was pretty cut and dried. But I wouldn't be afraid to do that if I needed to clear something up.' He looks me in the eye so I can see his purity of intent.
'Everything really is good now... I used to drink whenever I went out. It's interesting to see how much Hollywood and that kind of Hollywood thing revolves around drinking, and I don't just mean Hollywood, it's socialising. When I was in London I stayed at the Charlotte Street Hotel. At 5.30pm at night everyone was drinking.' Eckhart would avoid all that and go over the road and eat alone in Thai Metro.
So how did your social life change? 'Dramatically. I have no reason to be out past midnight. Friends that I thought were friends, I don't associate with them. Not because I dislike them, I just have no reason to be with them.' Because drinking was the bond? 'Yes, drinking, partying, chasing, you know, all that sort of stuff.'
In the broader sense it seems Eckhart no longer has o chase. His fully fledged, filling-the-screen leading man moment has arrived and the elusive settling down thing is no longer elusive. He has been in a stable relationship for a year. 'I hope it's stable. I think we're pretty good. I think she understands me. That's something I want more in my life. We'll see what happens. I'm getting older. I want to have children. Sometimes I say to myself though, you are just not that kind of guy.' He flashes me a look of torture. He's very worried that he might not be that kind of guy.
However, it seems that insecure, fearful Eckhart has morphed into his lust-for-life screen chef character Nick. While Zeta-Jones carries the intensity, the weight of the film, what Eckhart carries for the first time in his screen life is joy. His character is, he says, exactly what women want. 'He loves to cook, he's good with children, he listens, he cares. I think that's what women want in a man.' He shifts about a bit, not sure whether that is quite yet him. What is him is to take a simple character and make it complicated. 'I got an important message from my character there that I would like to embody more in my own life. Don't be afraid to try your hardest and then let it go. Don't take anything seriously. When you do a role like this, the boyfriend role, you can still have opinions, you can still give it backbone. I think in real life I'm a bit more complicated than this character, but you can still take something from him.'
The child he's so good with is Abigail Breslin, Oscar-nominated for Little Miss Sunshine. Zeta-Jones's sister dies and she suddenly finds herself mother. The routine of a high-powered chef is not geared to having children and the movie is about learning to change. Eckhart's character provides the parental instinct.
Zeta-Jones and Eckhart trained in the kitchen of the New York celebrity chef Michael White. Zeta-Jones had to prepare sauces and pan-toss small items and Eckhart had to chop vegetables and fillet fish. They also had to try not to cut themselves with extra-sharp knives and grasp hot pot handles in a tiny, adrenalin-charged kitchen. 'In preparing for this role I thought, why would a chef devote himself to food? What is it about him that he wants to prepare food?
What made him want to play this role? 'There's something here when I do this one thing - it's so pure and it feels so good it compels me. The pains that these guys go through, it's insane. But I saw these chefs make something perfect and beautiful. They watch you eat it and it's something that's inside of them.' Eckhart's previous performances don't necessarily fill you like comfort food. If this performance were a dish he'd fill you like a cosy pumpkin ravioli.
While he was doing this movie, the tabloids delighted in rumours that he was the romantic lead off-screen as well as on for Zeta-Jones. He points out that he was accused of having an affair with Gwyneth Paltrow when they starred in Possession. The rumours went that she had a huge appetite for sex but as a Mormon he had to deny her. 'Maybe they do this to sell papers or to sell the movie. In general, my life has not been interesting to gossip papers. I'm not your big movie star, you know. Nobody follows me around. But with Catherine, yes, it was different. And some tabloid out of England said we were having an affair and her husband was jealous, all that sort of thing. Well it's just not true. People would call me up. My mum called me up and said what's going on. I had to sit my girlfriend down and say I want you to know this is false.' He looks upset by the accusations. 'My girlfriend is a good cook. She wants to move to Paris to become a pastry chef. I like to go to the market and get vegetables with her.'
Not so settled then if she's moving to Paris. 'I'd like to go to Paris with her. In the past in interviews I used to say I'm not going to say the name because we might break up. I mean, what was that about? I don't want to sound like a self-help book, but I was trying not to fear it.'
In past relationships have you been the one more loved or the one that loves more? 'This is such an egotistical answer, but I have to say I would be the one that breaks things off because I had a fear of some sort of commitment. I'm working through it though. I would hate for people to think there was just one side to me.'
Eckhart once said he thought he shouldn't do interviews because it gave his power away. He hated to be pinned down as if that made him seem less of himself, smaller. Now he seems over that. He doesn't remove imaginary eyelashes or talk about his pets as a distraction.
By contrast to his romantic lead in No Reservations, in Alan Ball's new movie, Nothing is Private, based on the book Towelhead by Alicia Erian, he plays a man who has an affair with a 13-year-old girl. 'It goes beyond anything I've ever done.' He takes a breath. 'It was hard to do, hard to do. The performances are wonderful and it's a great movie, but fun as Nick was, this was the opposite.' He's keen to keep every opportunity open and after the darkness of Nothing is Private he is doing another romantic comedy. 'It's called Travelling. It's about a grief counsellor,' he says with an ambiguous smile.
Typical of a person who doesn't enjoy being pinned down, he loves to pin down other people. He's studied body language. He's even said he employed it on a few dates. As I had read this, I was careful that my feet wouldn't point in any particular direction, I didn't want to look too open, too closed, too critical, too adoring. But too late. He tells me that when he talked about the paedophile I folded my arms and leaned forward and that's when I became guarded. And he says of himself: 'Look I'm being open. I pick up my drink. When we just talked about Nothing is Private I closed as well. But if we are going to talk about something that pleases me I lean back. It's all easy stuff. Like if someone clears their throat they might say they have a cold, but the fact is they are throat constricted because something came up that they didn't like. I use it because characters have to send universal messages,' he says with an open, easy half smile.
And what was his message in Thank You For Smoking, where he has a grin so huge it takes over the screen? 'I wanted to be welcoming,' he says sweetly. 'Jason Reitman [the director] said: "I want you to smile in this movie. You never smile in movies."' As a child his mother told him to smile more. She wanted him to show his feelings because he was often shy and didn't want anybody to know what he was feeling.
Eckhart was born in San Jose, California, where his dad worked for a computer company. But when 13, his father's job moved to England. They lived in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, and he went to school in Cobham. 'Imagine going from 85 degrees and beaches to rainy days and a pink cottage. I'd just started surfing and getting into girls... I learnt to love it though. I quickly understood that I was having an experience in life that few people had.' Then he learnt to love being displaced. 'I went to Australia, then Hawaii, then France and Switzerland.' So there's a kind of restlessness about you? 'Yes, and my parents are always moving. When I lived in England the gypsies would come to Cobham and set up the circus. I remember thinking I don't want to be in the circus, I don't like that lifestyle, it's too transient for me, too dirty, and then I joined the circus. That's the irony of life, isn't it?'
It seems like he's always been at odds with himself, both fearing and needing to settle down. Wanting to be applauded for how good he is at playing the bad boy when really he just wanted to be good.
Are you close to your parents? 'Very,' he says emphatically. He is particularly close to his mother. 'My mum knows that I'm introspective and shy. My whole filmography my mum could probably do without. But this movie she would love,' he says, pleased that he is pleasing his mother. 'She is a writer, an artist, a poet. She recently told me her first love was to be an actress, but she never did it.' Are you fulfilling her dreams? 'In a way, but it's sad that she didn't let herself go for it.'
His parents are Mormons. His father got a scholarship to Brigham Young University, and converted while there. 'My parents were raised in small towns in Montana. They went there, converted and got married, so they were an island of Mormonism in their own families. I value the church very much. As you get older you find your own way. I am in the process of finding my own way.'
How would you classify your religion? 'I would say universal law is my religion. Being good to people and also knowing how the world works.' You mean reap what you sow kind of stuff? 'Kind of,' he says, pulling a face. 'But I would like to think of it all in a less punishing literal sense. I've always found this a bit difficult. I've told my mum this. There is a darker side of religion. The punishment issue. The hellfire and brimstone. People concentrate on that more than they concentrate on the joy. Kids get scared. That's what they remember. Not the Sermon on the Mount.'
I think it's much easier to be attracted to the dark scary stuff, and people are afraid of the light. 'That's interesting,' he says. 'Afraid of the light. I think that's true.' Is it so ridiculous a metaphor to say that you are afraid of the light, that that is why you gravitated towards the dark scary characters? 'I think that might be true.' He ponders a position of fearlessness and lightness. His face has a new smile, a quizzical one. Just a little ambiguous, it's the face that his mother must have told him was impenetrable - you'd never know what he was really thinking. But then he widens it to his less complicated, happy smile. And his handshake goodbye is warm, solid and heartfelt.
· No Reservations opens on 31 August
