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This could be the Mr Darcy moment for Toby Stephens. Eleven summers ago Colin Firth was just another good-looking British actor. Then came the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice. Firth, as Darcy, dived into a lake and emerged, wetly, in a clinging shirt, a star. In a few weeks, the BBC begins its four-part adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Toby Stephens plays Rochester, the heroine’s mysterious lust object. Stephens is 37 (Firth was a year younger), a master of the classical stage who has teetered on the brink of movie fame. Obviously, he is going to be all over the media this autumn, soaking up the adulation, posing for magazine covers, and batting calls from Hollywood casting directors.

Except, actually, he isn’t. I track him down to the patio of the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Los Angeles, where he has been playing Custer in a new BBC history series, Heroes of the Wild West, but he is about to fly to New Zealand, his wife’s homeland, which is where he will stay, doing little, until the end of the year. His director on Jane Eyre, Susanna White, responsible for the second half of Bleak House, is trying to find his decision to scarper amusing. He admits that Sandy Welch, the adaptor, is appalled.

“She and Stephen Poliakoff (her TV dramatist husband) have this attitude that you want to be there and enjoy the whole thing, watch it go out on TV. I have an absolute terror of that.”

But why? Stephens, who is dressed in a pink polo shirt that accessorises his auburn hair and freckly arms, is drinking tea when I arrive. He looks too relaxed to be terrified of anything. “I just find it quite scary being around the press showings. The next day, after it’s gone out, you think everybody’s watched. Only about one in every 100 has actually, but you think everybody’s got an opinion about you.”

Was it the same after he played the Bond villain in Die Another Day? “I disappeared after that to New Zealand. I was there for the premiere and everything and then I got the hell out.”

The contradictory aspect of this is that Stephens knows what Jane Eyre could mean for him. He says he grabbed at the chance with both hands. He then worked extraordinarily hard filming it, mainly at Haddon Hall, over a particularly cruel Derbyshire winter. “I remember sitting in the main hall thinking: ‘This is f***ing torture.’ My face was frozen in this kind of rictus and I thought: ‘This is going to be Rochester’s expression. I can’t move anything.’ It was horrible for about three, four weeks and then it slowly started thawing out. By the summer it was the most beautiful place on earth.”

He appreciates that, rictus grin or not, his Rochester will not satisfy all of the book’s devotees. “Every woman has their own idea of Mr Rochester. I’d had this image in my head of him being this rather remote, enigmatic, taciturn figure. And I read the book again and, actually, he never shuts up. He just grinds on and on and on, and he’s actually quite theatrical.”

In the book Rochester has to adapt to a female personality as wilful as his own. Susanna White says that Stephens exhibited no comparable agonies working for a female director. But, then, he is used to strong women: his mother is Dame Maggie Smith. It sounds, I say, like a competitive family of actors: not only Smith, but his late father Sir Robert Stephens and his elder brother, Chris Larkin, recently seen in Master and Commander.

“Certainly, between me and my brother it has never been competitive. And if I even tried to be competitive with my mother I’d be committing suicide,” he replies. Robert Stephens, on the other hand, one of the most eccentric actors to grace the boards, was not above competitive thoughts about his younger son. In 1994 Toby became the RSC’s youngest Coriolanus and gave a dazzling performance. But it was not the one his father had wanted him to give.

“I went to him for advice and he was very keen to give it! He said when Coriolanus is confronted by his mother there was a complicit understanding, this solidarity between them. And I was going: ‘Well, that’s fine if you’re playing him at your age. With your attitude, that would work so brilliantly. But I can’t do it, because I’m 25’.”

Toby was 4 when Stephens walked out on his marriage to Smith, who four months later married her former fiancé, the playwright Beverly Cross. Toby barely saw his father while growing up, and briefly wondered if he was dead. In Knight Errant, his ghosted autobiography written shortly before his death in 1995, Stephens Sr, blamed Smith for the failure of their marriage and detailed his affairs with Vanessa Redgrave and Lady Antonia Fraser. The book mentions Toby only half a dozen times. “For no reason at all they were a bit nervous about seeing me,” the father writes of his boys’ yearly lunches with him. At one point he complains that Toby, as a child, had lied to him about a knife he had found; it was still an issue between them a decade later.

“It’s nothing against Michael Coveney (the ghost-writer), but I’ve never read the book,” Toby says. “I think Michael had a problem. My dad told him: ‘You’re writing my book.’ And, it was great copy as well. But, Robert was off his face on steroids at the time. I don’t know how much truth there is in it.”

I notice he calls him Robert. Is that what he called him when he was alive? “Yes.” Did he love him? “Our relationship was complicated. I hadn’t seen him for a very long period of my life, from when I was about 4 through to when I was about 16. I had a couple of glimpses of him along the way, but really I didn’t see him. I was brought up by my stepfather.”

I would have been furious with him. “Well, I wasn’t really. My stepfather stepped so brilliantly into the breach that actually he took away that sort of feeling. My feelings for Robert were: well, I think I was more intrigued and fascinated by him and I had enormous respect for him when I saw him on stage. And I think there’s a blood thing that makes you fascinated. It’s inevitable because you want to know what that person is and what that then implies for you.”

If one believes genes are destiny, Robert Stephens predicted clashing futures for him. On the positive side came his acting talent (heavily fortified, obviously, by Smith’s genes). On the minus, Robert was an alcoholic who died at 64. By his mid-twenties Toby was also drinking heavily.

“I wasn’t someone who hung out in Groucho’s till five in the morning or, you know, every night. But I would go home and drink on my own, which is a rather more kind of depressing thing. I don’t think I was doing it out of any great emotional need. It’s more that once you’ve started you can’t stop; a chemical need that your body has.”

Yet, I say, because I have checked, his reputation at the RSC during Coriolanus was exemplary. “I’d actually stopped when I was there because that was when my father was very ill with it. And I had to stop anyway to do that play. But then I started again, stupidly, after my father died and rapidly spiralled out of control.

“It was a hard time because about a year after he died my stepfather died and both events kind of, in different ways — I was much closer to my stepdad — really knocked me for six. If you have a propensity to do that, it just exaggerates it and it became very exaggerated for about two or three years after that. And then I stopped when I went to New York to act in this play, because I was really beginning to worry about my work. I just thought: ‘

Well, this is a great opportunity for me, and I don’t want to fall flat on my face in New York’.”

Yet his father had a magnificent career? “He had a great career, but then he also had a huge period when nobody would go near him. He actually walked out of Double Dealing and a couple of other ones, and he did have a reputation for it. He was an incredibly brilliant actor, but he was an alcoholic and he didn’t have as brilliant a career as he should have done. At the end of his life, watching those plays, watching his Falstaff and watching his King Lear, I really regretted all of those things that he was never given the chance to play and he didn’t give himself a chance to play. And that’s what made me, I think, want to take care of myself. I wanted to give myself a chance to do these things.”

His drinking had helped scupper his relationship with a fiancée, but in New York, sober, playing Ring Round the Moon on Broadway, he fell in love with the actress Anna-Louise Plowman. They married in 2001 at the Roman Catholic Farm Street church in Mayfair, London (his faith having waxed as his drinking waned).

His Hollywood career has not so far been spectacular — a flashback in Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys, a lame adaptation of A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Lensky in a rather good Onegin that no one saw. He made most impact in Die Another Day as Gustav Graves, the genetically modified business mogul who nearly betters 007 in a sword fight.

“It was great fun. It was also very intimidating. I felt slightly lost at times — very lost, actually — because it was such a huge machine. Doing big films like that I actually find myself being quite intimidated and feeling slightly sort of, ‘Why am I here?’” More interesting has been his recent work in Britain: an effective Philby in the BBC’s Cambridge Spies; (his wife played Donald Maclean’s wife); Lord Snowdon in Channel 4’s rompish satire The Queen’s Sister; and the Dane in the RSC’s 2004 Hamlet. Just released in cinemas is Severance, which he describes as The Office meets Deliverance.

“When I was at drama school, one felt that the only way to really become a heavyweight actor was to have this spiritual connection, and I found that very misleading. At the end of the day, one is just earning a living. I don’t want it to be some sort of cathartic, psychotherapeutic exercise for myself. I think that’s very dangerous, and I think that’s when acting becomes wank actually. I think what’s really great is having objectivity. You have to invest yourself, your experiences, in a character. But I think the very important thing is to remain objective.”

I doubt that Brontë lovers will be objective about his Rochester. Controversy may also surround Ruth Wilson, the unknown whom White chose to play Jane. At least, however, having met her briefly on location in the spring, I can confirm that she looks the part. But is the world ready for a ginger Rochester? “Oh, he looks very different from me, I promise. I wore hair extensions and have black, curly shaggy hair. In the book the both of them are quite plain physically. At the time, what was seen as attractive was somebody slim and fair in a cavalry uniform; he was this shaggy, dark, blue-chin, person. But she finds him handsome.”

My bet is that viewers, like Jane, are going to fall for him too, and big time. Let’s hope the news filters down to the other side of the world.