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Stratford-upon-Avon on a summer’s day. Bardsville is bustling. Coaches pull up outside the Royal Shakespeare Company’s headquarters and belch out bemused-looking Americans and Japanese here for a two-hour wander, lunch, then Warwick Castle in the afternoon. In the lobby of the main theatre, a young French couple argue earnestly about what it is they are supposed to do here. See a play, suggests the girl. We won ’t understand, he shrugs. It’s Romeo and Juliet, you’ve seen the film, she responds.

Round the back, at the stage door, the talk is of Toby Stephens, the 35-year-old actor son of Dame Maggie Smith and the late great Sir Robert Stephens, who opens as Hamlet this week. Just over a decade ago, a precociously young Toby Stephens played Coriolanus here to tumultuous applause. Rave reviews spoke of a young prince assuming his dynastic destiny and predicted international stardom. “I worried about him back then, though,” confides one RSC stalwart. “He seemed introverted. I thought he might either buckle under the pressure or that it would all go to his head. But this time round he’s lovely — happier and more confident.”

A beaming Stephens arrives from rehearsal. Clad, as any self- respecting Hamlet should be, in head-to-toe black, he is shorter, stockier and more muscle-bound than one expects from photographs. From his mother he has inherited fine features and her ginger, freckled colouring. His deep, plummy voice is said to be reminiscent of his father’s.

For Stephens Jr, it is an odd experience being back in Stratford, which he can find claustrophobic. “It was quite creepy at first,” he says. “Because the building’s the same, it all smells the same, but you’re with a new bunch of people and you’ve moved on. You’re not the same person.”

There are ghosts for him here, too. One of the factors that made his 1994 triumph as Coriolanus so extraordinary was that it coincided with the landmark RSC Lear of his formerly estranged, alcoholic father, whose career was then experiencing an autumnal flowering after decades out in the cold. Sir Robert would apparently come and see his son’s performance, then give him his notes. “It certainly was helpful having his input,” says the son loyally, of the father who died of organ failure in 1995. “But it’s also lovely being here without all that. You know, ‘You’re on your own, pal.’”

Of course, the weight of expectation on his Hamlet is not just down to genealogy. At 25, Stephens’s precociously assured Coriolanus was proclaimed to have reinvented the role. The future, it seemed, was his — only it wasn’t, entirely. True, he has done some fine stage work with the Almeida, been a Bond baddie and a Cambridge spy; but he went to Hollywood and came home empty-handed, and this is his first Shakespearian lead since his swaggering Roman warrior. At 35, he is nearing the upper age limit for playing Hamlet, Henry V and the bulk of the bard’s romantic bucks. “Yes, time’s running out,” he says ruefully.

Bad timing may also be to blame if his Hamlet, the first production to be directed by RSC director Michael Boyd since his appointment last year, is not as hotly anticipated as it should be.

In April, a Trevor Nunn-directed “yoof” Hamlet opened at the Old Vic in London, to immense acclaim. Its star is the 23-year-old Ben Whishaw, who plays the student prince as an angst-ridden malcontent in a black beanie hat. Hailed a Hamlet for our times, Whishaw’s Dane has garnered the best reviews for a young actor’s Shakespearian debut since, well, Toby Stephens’s Coriolanus. The irony is not lost on the latter, who has avoided seeing it.

“I do feel a parity with this guy. But then I’m also thinking, ‘Christ, we’re opening in a few weeks, and you’ve had a lot of press attention, quite deservedly, so when we come along, everyone will be sick to death of it.’”

But, of course, the play’s the thing. And the thing about Hamlet, says Stephens, is that “it is endlessly delvable”. “You know, you can mine it and mine it and mine it. So much depends on the actor playing Hamlet and the director directing it.”

Boyd chose Stephens because he knew he could be a convincing avenger. “I think the play has languished in an area where people think it’s about this depressive, withdrawn scholar who’s incapable of revenge,” says Stephens. “But, in fact, it’s a revenge play. I believe that Hamlet is capable of killing Claudius, but to kill a king in the paranoid world of a Renaissance court meant you yourself would be killed. And whose authority is he acting on? A ghost that only four people have seen. And having killed a king, what are the moral implications? How does one avenge a murder without being branded a murderer oneself? And if he is then killed, where will his soul end up? He already knows his father’s soul is in purgatory.”

He has had months to prepare for the part, and an influence on the Catholic Stephens has been the new historicist Stephen Greenblatt’s acclaimed 2001 study, Hamlet in Purgatory, which explores the general confusion among post-Reformation audiences about what would now happen to their souls after death. “Nobody’s really worked out whether the ghost is a Protestant or Catholic spirit,” says Stephens.

Daniel Day-Lewis famously fled the stage after believing he had seen the ghost of his father. Stephens laughs off as ludicrous any suggestion this could happen to him, but adds that “it would be a very pleasant surprise if I did”. Yet having been bereaved of his father and the beloved stepfather who brought him up helps his understanding of Hamlet. “A huge prop is knocked away and leaves you to reassess the world,” he says.

One positive from the death of Robert Stephens was that it brought Toby and his elder brother, the actor Chris Larkin, into contact with a half-sister. After the death of their stepfather, Beverley Cross, they cemented this relationship. “With Robert it was always very confusing, because it felt like a betrayal to my stepfather,” says Stephens. “After they’d both died, I thought I’d be a fool to not get to know my sister better. And now I have a niece and nephew.” Stephens, who married the New Zealand actress Anna-Louise Plowman in 2001, has always been close to his mother. “It’s from her that I inherited my very practical sense of what acting is,” he says. “You know, it’s not some hocus-pocus spiritual thing. It’s fundamentally about doing what you do to earn a buck, and if you can move people along the way and make them understand something, then great.”

Keeping the wolf from the door comes up a lot in conversation with Stephens — as indeed it does with most actors. He is engaged with Hamlet until December, but then hopes to find a lucrative film or television part. There is an ideal career plan, which would combine interesting theatre and screen roles. “But, for the moment, I can’t afford to be too selective,” he insists, with a brittle laugh.

He is certainly driven and certainly strict with himself. He has not drunk in five years, since he began to suspect a genetic disposition for his father’s alcoholism. He exercises daily and barely picks over a salad at lunchtime. “I have one of those physiques that goes south extremely quickly,” he sighs.

His brief sojourn in Hollywood clearly knocked his confidence, but ironically he may now achieve superstardom in Bollywood. He has just finished filming The Rising, with the Lagaan star Aamir Khan. Stephens, who had to deliver lines in Hindi and Urdu as well as English, plays a Scottish officer who joined the Indian Mutiny. He describes the experience as quite otherworldly, but balks at the idea of becoming a Bollywood pin-up. “Their actors are treated like gods — it’s frightening. I like being able to rove around.”

What if his Hamlet were to fulfil the promise of his Coriolanus and establish him as a star? “I’ll be happy if people forget it’s over three hours long,” he says modestly. “Though there is a heroic quality to Hamlet that I’d love to bring back.” His father, incidentally, never played the part, though he was once Horatio to Peter O’Toole’s Dane. A family first, then? “Yes, for once,” grins Stephens. “A family first.”