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Great things have always been expected of Toby Stephens. He is the son of two great actors: Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens. He has already notched up a mesmerising Coriolanus and a formidable Hamlet, not to mention a brooding Rochester in the BBC’s Jane Eyre. So which great cultural figure is he playing next? “I suppose I’m Sid James,” he laughs.

Well, not exactly. Taking a breather from rehearsals in Tottenham Court Road in London the annoyingly handsome 38-year-old – not at all as buttoned up as his past work might suggest – says that William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy The Country Wife might have been penned in 1675, but it is really just a Carry On in corsets. “It is all about sex; everyone is obsessed with sex.”

Stephens plays Horner (a good Carry On name) who devotes his days to cutting a swath through the womenfolk of London society. The husbands trust him because he claims he is impotent. In fact he is busy making cuckolds of them all. Controversial in its day, the plot was adapted three centuries later for Warren Beatty’s Hollywood hairdresser romp-com Shampoo.

The star sees echoes in modern society. “It was a period where there were people with incredibly loose morality and a lot of money. It was all about consumerism, going out, getting p***ed and f***ing. It is about superficiality, and a lot of what we are about is utter superficiality.”

The Country Wife is the first production from Jonathan Kent’s new Theatre Royal Haymarket Company, which has two more plays in the pipeline. Edward Bond’s The Sea and a Ruthie Henshall musical, Marguerite, follow in 2008. In a West End where quality control is dubious, this has to be a good thing.

For Stephens, Horner is a welcome “peach of a part”. One would have thought that someone of his calibre would never be short of work. But it is a cautionary tale for anyone considering an acting career that Stephens struggled recently. “I took five months off to go to New Zealand with my wife. When I came back I stupidly assumed I’d get offers and there was complete silence,” he says. For a while things looked bad. “Then Betrayal at the Donmar [Warehouse] came up, then this.” Relief all round. “My agent said, ‘Please don’t do that again.’ ”

In person Stephens is less strikingly haughty than expected. He is almost blokeishly handsome: good teeth, dark reddish hair. Lose a stone, stick on some dodgy dentures and he could play the young David Bowie if they ever make the biopic. Yet there is something coiled up about him on the screen. He could clearly sneer for England, but he likes to loosen up and have a laugh too, which was one of the attractions of The Country Wife. “I find it sad that one’s range is not fully used. You become a totem for some sort of aspect, whether it’s class or a look, which is boring. I’m known as the one who always plays the villain, that’s what I get even though I’ve done a lot of other things.”

His biggest villain, of course, was the sword-wielding Gustav Graves in Die Another Dayin 2002. It was a part that Stephens does not disown, but “it was a blip. Great fun, but I avoided roles like that after. I didn’t want to end up as he Brit who always plays the Hollywood baddie.”

He is ambivalent about working in America. “Parts of me would love to make huge movies and huge amounts of money. But these days so much is about what was the last thing you were in, and I don’t have that kind of track record. I’m sure if I chiselled away I’d get somewhere but I didn’t want to go down that route. Besides, Hollywood can be soulless.”

Yet he still does his share of chiselling. He regularly joins the Brit-pack who fly over to talk about TV pilots. “You meet the producers, then the network, then more suits. Brits are just cheap labour over there. But it can work out. Matthew Rhys was at the Royal Shakespeare Company with me and he’s fantastic in Brothers and Sisters. Hugh Laurie completely reinvented himself. I’d give my right arm to be in something like The Sopranos, but another part of me loves what I do here.”

Stephens is driven, but maybe not as much as he was in his early days when the shadow of his acting family cast a large shadow. His parents, Dame Maggie Smith and Sir Robert Stephens, were tough acts to follow. Smith still is. Yet their second son (Stephens’s older brother Chris Larkin, who changed his name because of an Equity doppelgänger, is also in the family business, and appeared in Master and Commander) does not recall a childhood in which he was carried from theatre to theatre in a trunk. Robert Stephens and Smith split when Toby was 4 and his mother eventually married the writer Beverley Cross. He considered Cross to be his father, seeing very little of his biological dad until his teens.

“My parents were actually very private people. It was not a house with actors coming and going like in a Noël Coward play. But I did see a lot of theatre when I was a child and that must have seeped into me. By the time I was about 15 I’d seen a huge amount of Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov.”

He had seen enough to be drawn towards the theatre and studied drama at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, before his career quickly took off with an appearance in Peter Hall’s TV adaptation of The Camomile Lawn in 1992. Major roles and awards followed, but so did great expectations. And it was not just talent that he inherited from his parents. Like his father, the young actor also drank excessively, nearly missing a matinee with Diana Rigg because of a heavy night.

He put those days behind him at the start of the decade. He married the New Zealand actress Anna-Louise Plowman in 2001 and becoming a father this summer has brought further equilibrium. Baby bottles have replaced vodka bottles. The only recent stress was coming up with a name.

“After months of negotiations we came up with Elijah or Eli. It became an obsession. We were in a maternity-wear shop in LA and they had a book of boys’ names, and while my wife was trying on jeans I was going: ‘Darling, what do you think of Orion?’ I lost any sense of direction.”

Having a child also raises the prospect of the Stephens acting dynasty continuing, which fills him with dread. “I think I’ll make him go through every other option before getting into this business. My parents tried to make sure that it was what I wanted to do. When you’ve been in the profession you wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It is incredibly creative, the hours are fantastic, but it is becoming such a hard place to be in.”

In Maggie Smith he has a grand babysitter on tap: “She is incredibly, incredibly pleased. I know the way people see her it might seem odd, but she is very good. And parenthood is terribly moving for me. Having lost both my father and stepfather, our family was dwindling, so it is really lovely to see it expand.”

But as well as booking her for babysitting duty, will Stephens ever work with his mother? In the past he has said no, but are the goalposts shifting? “It’s such a tricky thing. I’m blown away by what she does so I just don’t know whether I have the chops. And to me above everything she’s my mother. I really value that intimacy. I’m immensely proud to be her son, but at the same time I don’t want to be defined purely by that. It took a huge effort to get out of the gravity of that orbit. I’d learn so much, but another part of me is frightened of it.”