Matthew Macfadyen was idling on the stoop of his boutique Manhattan hotel last month when a man walked past and said warmly: “I loved you in Billions.” Macfadyen, at 44, is one of the handful of male British actors on US TV – among them Benedict Cumberbatch, Dominic West and the actor for whom Macfadyen was mistaken, Damian Lewis – whom to American eyes can appear indistinguishable. “Thank you!” he replied, cheerfully. (Macfadyen is extremely polite, and inclined to be grateful for any recognition at all.) “Then he came back two minutes later and said: ‘Succession! So sorry.’” He roars with laughter.

Tom Wambsgans, the role Macfadyen plays in Succession, is robustly against type. In the 14 years since he played Darcy to Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, Macfadyen’s career has leaned heavily towards period drama. He did Anna Karenina and Little Dorrit. When the pilot script for Succession reached him, he had just played Mr Wilcox in the BBC adaptation of Howards End. Tom, the ambitious, oleaginous husband to an Elisabeth Murdoch-type heiress was as far from these foppish roles as Macfadyen could get, a gift even before the show took off. “I thought: ‘I don’t know if this is going to have a life and I don’t know where the characters are going to go. But it’s clever and farcically funny.’” At the very least, he thought, “it’ll show I can do an American accent”.

In the event, Succession was one of the breakout hits of last year; a smart, funny, compulsively watchable drama about Logan Roy, an ailing media plutocrat, played by Brian Cox, and his furiously competing adult children. It was created by Jesse Armstrong, of Peep Show and The Thick of It, and combined the feel of a stately, prestige HBO show with the savage compound-swearing that is recognisable to anyone who loves Armstrong’s work. “It’s very caustic,” says Macfadyen, “which you recognise as a Brit.” In spite of the show’s American characters and setting, he is right when he says “there’s a British sensibility to it”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Macfadyen with Sarah Snook in Succession. Photograph: HBO/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

We are in a restaurant in midtown Manhattan during the last days of Macfadyen’s three-month stint filming the show’s second season. At the end of the week, he is due to fly to Croatia to film episode 10 and then home to London to his family: his wife, Keeley Hawes, and their two children, Maggie and Ralph. The last time I saw Macfadyen, he was in New York filming season one of Succession and Hawes was in the UK riding out the fuss around her BBC drama Bodyguard. Now, with Macfadyen’s success in the US – albeit more muted than British hysteria around Bodyguard – their positions are reversed.

“It was peculiar,” he says, of the fuss surrounding his wife’s show. “Richard Madden couldn’t leave his house! There was a WhatsApp group in his street, with friends saying: ‘It’s bad today, stay in.’ It was really bonkers.”

Succession is a vastly superior show and, along with the other actors, Macfadyen is excellent in it. As Tom, he plays a man of staggering venality and weakness who is nonetheless not wholly a monster. “While on one level, they are all revolting and the rest of it, they’re not amoral,” he says. “They’re doing their best with what they’ve got. And it’s a family, so instantly you’ve got a hook.” The occasionally ludicrous lengths to which characters go to achieve their aims are no more ludicrous, says Macfadyen, than real life. “Just look at what’s going on in the world now – people turning their backs in the European parliament. If they put that in a show, you wouldn’t believe it.”

Tom, he agrees, is “dreadful. Excruciating. And joyful to play because he’s so particular. I’m flexing a muscle that I haven’t flexed for a bit. We laugh a lot, me and Nick Braun who plays Greg [Logan Roy’s pathetic grandnephew and the only person lower in the family food chain than Tom]. It’s exquisite.”

And yet, he says: “Tom’s quite sweet in some ways. He really does love [his screen wife] Shiv. And they have reached an arrangement about their modern, polygamous marriage, which he is manfully going along with. I think he’d really like to, you know, just go and be a ski instructor or open a hotel in the west.”

In spite of almost 20 years of solid visibility on UK screens, Macfadyen is unfailingly modest about his achievements. You do something good and then you wait, he says, and often nothing of value comes along. “I felt like I was treading water a little bit in the UK just before Howards End. I’d done a show called Ripper Street, in which I was a Victorian copper, which was lovely. But there were certain things I didn’t want to do after that; I didn’t want to do an ITV drama, or thriller. That sounds snobbish, but you know what I mean. So you wait for a play or a movie.”

One of the projects he said yes to was a movie with Benedict Cumberbatch called The Current War, the story of Thomas Edison’s race with George Westinghouse to “put a star in a jar” as Edison puts it in the movie, and be the first to provide the US with electricity. Macfadyen plays JP Morgan, who financed both men. It is a small, but satisfying, role in a gripping and beautifully shot movie that also tackles Edison’s grief at the loss of his wife. Watching the movie, you are struck by a sense of precedent: that, 100 years from now, similar projects will be made about the race to own the internet.

Macfadyen has yet to see the result. “Does it work?” he says keenly. “Is it interesting? It’s quite a dry subject, if I’m honest.” He bursts out laughing. In fact, it does work and is oddly moving. The film is beautifully directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, and co-stars Nicholas Hoult as Nikola Tesla, the eccentric third participant in the race, who memorably died broke and alone in a hotel room in New York. Macfadyen is suitably pompous as Morgan, and Cumberbatch plays the kind of twitchy, mercurial character he has come to specialise in – his performance as Edison is recognisably in the vein of Sherlock and Patrick Melrose.

The story of the race to invent electricity was never going to break box office records, but, for Macfadyen, it came down to finding interest in that particular period of history and the chance to work with a terrific team.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Macfadyen, with MyAnna Buring, in Ripper Street. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

“I thought the script was good. I thought it would be fun – nice, prestigious, and with great people.” And JP Morgan was an interesting character. “He had this enormous bulbous nose, and wouldn’t let anyone photograph him. And he bailed out the economy, apparently. His house in London was kept staffed, and they made him a full breakfast every morning, in case he arrived unexpectedly. Then every morning, they cleared it away.”

Other movies in the pipeline are a cameo in The Assistant, a film based on a Harvey Weinstein-type character. “It’s not pointed out that it’s Weinstein, but it’s obviously set in the bad old days of Miramax. I had one day’s work as head of HR, and it was great. Good fun. I mean, not good fun; but a really clever script. Because all [the abuse] is in increments. What’s awful about it is how banal it is. There is no point where you can have anyone up for anything.”

Last time we met, Macfadyen had talked about the disparity between his and his wife’s experiences of the movie industry, from the fact “there are just less parts for women, and there’s also a weird thing with women where you’re the ingenue, and then there’s a wasteland, and then you’re Hedda Gabler”, to the fact that “men are, by and large, paid more than women. I know this from Keeley – that the sort of excuse they’ll use is: ‘Well he’s done a few American things.’ And you think, well, no. It’s not to do with that. It’s cobblers.”

He never had direct experience of Weinstein himself. But he and Hawes intuitively resisted moving to Los Angeles and immersing themselves more fully in Hollywood. “It didn’t seem like somewhere we wanted to live,” he says. The family came out to visit him in New York in half-term, but this time the novelty had worn off. “I’ve found it quite tough, this time, being away,” he says. “Partly because I haven’t gotten back as much as I did last time, but also I’ve done all the walks; I don’t need to buy any more jeans. And if I have more than three of four days off and I can’t get back, I miss the kids.”

The virtue of doing a series such as Succession is that there is a six-month break between seasons, during which time it’s conventional for actors to knock themselves out doing movie work or hustling for other high-profile projects. But after finishing season one of Succession, Macfadyen thought: sod it. “Keeley found herself busy in a bonkers way, and we had building work, and I just took the kids away. It was amazing. I took them to France for the whole summer. Maggie’s almost 15, and I was thinking: ‘She’s not going to put up with this for much longer,’ so we went and it was just heaven. Nothing was coming in for me and I thought: ‘Oh, fuck it, I’m just going to go.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Macfadyen as JP Morgan in The Current War. Photograph: Dean Rogers

In some ways, that kind of concentrated time with kids may be better than snatched hours at the end of the day. “That’s what I say to myself when I spend weeks away and start to think: ‘Oh, God.’ But that summer was magic. And the rest of this year Keeley’s busy and I’ll be able to be there again. Being on their nerves.”

Season two of the show feels even more timely than the first. These days, the dysfunctional Roy family puts you less in mind of the Murdochs than the Trumps. “There’s an absence of love, somewhere. And it all comes from daddy. They can’t really, truly, have any proper confidence in themselves even though they’re stuffed full of cash and can do anything.” Yes, if you’re raised by a narcissist, it’s no wonder you turn out like Ivanka. “Or those boys! Jesus Christ.”

The news depresses him. “I don’t know where to put my frustration. I get into a ball of fury about it, and then I don’t know what to do with it. Someone said to me the other day, why aren’t people protesting in the streets about the children at the border? People sort of shrug and say: ‘What can you do?’ You feel powerless. There was a brilliant article by Jonathan Freedland about how Trump wants to be a dictator. And then you shrug and think: ‘Oh, it’ll be all right.’”

The Current War review – Benedict Cumberbatch transmits medium voltage portrait of Thomas Edison Read more

He looks stricken. “Same with climate change. You know, ‘Someone will build a shield.’ Or, ‘Yeah, we’ll seed clouds in the sky.”

Time to buy a house in Duluth, I suggest. He laughs. “Keeley was saying something like this the other day: what about finding a house in wherever? You need a well.”

The best thing about filming Succession, says Macfadyen, is that it’s an ensemble piece and, for all its prestige, this takes the pressure off each individual actor. “There’s a lovely feeling on set of it being like a play. We do these scenes, and it’s curiously relaxing. Like with The Current War, you’re [the only one on camera] with your fake moustache, and it’s terrifying. It’s just you, doing one line. It’s much less frightening doing an eight-page scene with all these people in Succession because you have to pay attention to the other person. So you forget yourself. And then it gives you its own energy. Five pages in one take, ninja camera operators so that you never know if you’re going to be on or if they’re going to find you. It’s exciting.”

Macfadyen’s levity communicates the refreshing perspective that acting is really quite silly. Still, he says, when something is good it raises everyone up. “I really think that. I went to see Andrew Scott doing Hamlet a while ago, and I felt proud to be an actor. It was a great production. And it was a beautiful performance, not the terrible idiocy that it sometimes seems, but” – he looks surprised by his own conclusion – “thrilling.”

• The Current War is out in the UK on Friday 26 July