After decades of stage adulation, the Wolf Hall star has suddenly been catapulted into the mainstream. He talks about playing a Hollywood assassin, the power of crop circles – and the family tragedy that reshaped his world

There are two pieces of received wisdom about Mark Rylance. The first is that he’s the best actor of his generation. Al Pacino has been saying so for years: “Rylance speaks Shakespeare as if it was written for him the night before.” Theatre types cite seminal Romeos and Richards, Hamlets and Olivias, Rooster from Jerusalem, Bernard from Boeing Boeing. Sean Penn has courted him since 1995; photos of them at the premiere of the movie they have finally made show Penn saucer-eyed with adoration, Charlize Theron looking on.

But Rylance love-bombing only took off as a mainstream activity after Wolf Hall introduced his brimful features to BBC2. His Thomas Cromwell is like Hilary Mantel’s books: hard to read yet impossible to put down. The general verdict: Bafta must create new categories to accommodate his genius.

The second thing people tend to mention about Rylance is that he’s a bit of a fruitloop. A hippy – a pagan, even – who got married on ancient stones over the winter solstice, drives a G-Wiz, places faith in crop circles and wear hats indoors (today’s has a brooch on it in the shape of a bluebottle). Two days before we meet, he explains on Desert Island Discs how, in 1987, torn between Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun or the new RSC season, he turned for guidance to Chinese dice the I Ching. In this paper – which is also Rylance’s paper – we followed it up with a piece asking the I Ching what to have for lunch.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rylance in Wolf Hall. Photograph: Giles Keyte/BBC

He raises it, smile light, slightly disappointed. “I’m aware of being a subject of fun. I probably do wear foolish clothes and say foolish things. If I take offence, it’s my fault.”

As established, Rylance is the world’s greatest actor. Certainly, if anyone can put on a good show, it’s this guy (in his 20s he did, he says, have “issues with honesty”). Maybe, even those two givens – the wonderful plausibility and the weird credulity – are linked. Yet my bullshit detector never blips, even when he explains how the mind has two genders and is quite like a womb. Rather, Rylance just seems like one of the gentlest men I’ve met: all twinkle and fragility, no trace of Cromwell’s implacable hatchet-face.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The film team review The Gunman

Penn says he most envies him his kindness. Today, Rylance’s capacity for empathy even seems to stretch to the Fifty Shades of Grey movie (“vulnerable”, “such a well-intentioned thing”). Yes, he says softly, of course that plant on the table has a soul, as do dogs and rocks. “Of course the river has its own right to exist.” Such logic is presented as simple thought-evolution: “There was a time when people thought only white men had souls.”

He tells a story about a shaman he knows who was correctly warned by a coyote that his son was in danger. “And on the news the other day there was this amazing thing about dogs smelling prostate cancer in urine! And cats being trained to detect breast cancer in women! Maybe in 50 years they’ll just see not only how cruel we were to torture and kill and eat animals, but how foolish not to develop a healing relationship with them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Sean Penn in The Gunman. Photograph: Allstar/STUDIOCANAL

He sips his virgin Mary – no celery, head of pepper, massive olive courtesy of Theron, with whom he’s just had lunch. We’re at London’s Soho Hotel on a press day for The Gunman, a high-body-count thriller from the director of Taken. At 55, Rylance is still fresh enough on the junket scene to look up the original meaning of the word (“custard”). He plays Terry, a banker who once ran a Congo-based squad of assassins (including Penn and Ray Winstone). As projects go, it feels a bit skew whiff for a pacifist so committed that he winces at the very mention of American Sniper.

Well, he says, the film has a lot about the exploitation of Africa’s natural resources by multinationals (“western cosmology seems to be more about dominating nature than working with it”). Penn’s veneration is genuine and hard to resist. Likewise a “ridiculous amount of money” for eight days shooting.

Plus, he says, invoking Bob Dylan for the first of many times, the world is ruled by violence. But don’t such movies glamorise it? “I hope the jury is out. I don’t think the majority of people are encouraged to go and kill. I think the film could be more complex, probably, but I don’t think it’s mindless. It doesn’t mean that if somebody attacked my wife I wouldn’t, in a rage, kill them, but I would be ashamed of it afterwards.”

Capacity for killing aside, Rylance has little in common with either of his characters in The Gunman or Wolf Hall. Both are sober operators carefully calculating their way to the top. Rylance seeps compassion. His eyebrows seem to be speaking even when their owner isn’t. Cromwell is cool and detached save for an odd flash of emotion so transfixing that people glue themselves to the telly, twitcher-style, hoping for a glimpse. Most memorable, maybe, was the one that closed the series: Cromwell’s frightened eyes locked in an embrace by the monarch.

That’s a reason the show struck such a chord, thinks Rylance: people sympathise with the position. “It’s an awful thing to be aware of your own corruption. I think a lot of people are bound by the particular economic system we work in to serve companies and masters who aren’t really telling people what they’re doing.” Corporate buck-passing has meant it’s generally acceptable to abdicate responsibility. “As a leader you get a pat on the back when you make a hard choice.” That’s why Blair agreed to go into Iraq, he thinks: to prove to Bush he had the balls.

Rylance with his wife, Claire van Kampen. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA WIRE

Wolf Hall seems prescient in other ways, too. There were echoes of Ebola in the first-episode death of Cromwell’s wife and daughters. Then came the beheadings and immolations; news reports broadcast afterwards showed Isis meting out much the same treatment.

“It was the 15th century of Christianity and my understanding is we’re in the 15th century of Islam,” says Rylance. “In Europe we went through an enormous period of sectarianism, like Islam is at the moment. We, of course, didn’t have the Americans and the English bombing the hell out of us, and poisoning our children for 50,000 years with depleted uranium.”

His voice rises in upset. “I can’t believe even in the Guardian people ask the questions: ‘Where did Isis come from?’ ‘How did this happen?’ ‘Why do young Muslim women go off to join them?’ Maybe because we’ve been degrading their people since 1917. Maybe their teenage years are a little bit more stressed than that of Christianity.”

In the past, he’s been quoted as despising religion and science. Not true, he says. “I just see there being some similarities between the scientific cosmology that dominates at the moment and the religious. They both have heresies and, in the end, they’re both man-made definitions.”

Does he believe? Yes: not in a human deity but “images of archetypal energies”. Still, he can see why Stephen Fry (Malvolio to his Olivia in Twelfth Night) sticks with science. “A lot of my gay friends feel so angry about religion and its ridiculous condemnation – as if God would give a fuck about that.” Broadly, though, he appreciates the consolation. “I think the idea that life ends when we physically die is as painful as the idea in Cromwell’s time that there’s some awful purgatory, and you have to give money to the Catholic church to get your loved ones out.” A pause. “I certainly have experienced a lot of evidence that there’s a consciousness that isn’t physical.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ray Winstone and Mark Rylance talk about The Gunman

Rylance was born in 1960 in Sissinghurst, Kent. The family – both parents were teachers – moved to the US when he was two. He couldn’t speak properly until he was six, just vowelly yowling, intelligible only to his siblings. This was his subconscious shrinking at the prospect of all the public speaking to come, he’s said – today he relates it to the BFG, whom he plays in Spielberg’s new movie. “I love that he makes up words and can’t always be held accountable. We value clarity too much. The Greeks considered it only one of the seven modes of expression.”

Once he found his voice, he acted all round the house; at eight solemnly recreating Robert Kennedy’s funeral. He still sees vestiges of “crude early dramatic stances” in Wolf Hall. “I’m annoyed if I see myself putting on a kind of victim face. When I was a kid, one of the best ways to improvise was to go: ‘Oh the Klingons are attacking!’ or ‘Oh, I’ve been shot!’” He laughs hard and quite high-pitched.

At 18, he auditioned for Rada and moved to London. His rise was swift: Glasgow Citizens Theatre, then to the RSC (not Spielberg, not yet) for Hamlet and Romeo, helped by many mentors. “Sometimes the person who can spot the diamond in a young person is not the one to whom they’re related. That’s the case with the BFG and the little girl he kidnaps. Now, because of the abuse of Jimmy Savile and others, and because we live in such anonymous communities, many parents are very frightened of those kind of relationships. It’s a sadness in society.”

He won his first Olivier in 1993, as a bashful Benedict in Matthew Warchus’s Much Ado, then took on the artistic directorship of the Globe for a decade from 1995, delivering big returns before burnout and boardroom clashes led him to exit. He performed his own play, I am Shakespeare, about the authorship debate, then won every theatrical gong going for Boeing Boeing, then again for Jerusalem.

In 1987, Rylance met composer Claire van Kampen, then married with two small daughters. In an evolved-sounding outcome, Rylance took over as “co-parent” to Nataasha and Juliet, and he and their father, Chris, go on annual walking holidays. Juliet, now 35, is an actor who took Rylance’s name; Nataasha, a production designer, died suddenly, aged 28, of a brain haemorrhage on a flight in July 2012. Rylance pulled out of the impending Olympics opening ceremony, but stuck with a commitment later that month at the Globe, as Olivia in Twelfth Night and as Richard III. He has spoken about his sense that Nataasha was speaking in his ear while he was on stage.

Look back at Rylance’s interviews before the tragedy – one, dreadfully, on the morning of it – and there is a blitheness to him absent today. Yes, he says, people are drawn to solid narratives such as The Gunman because it’s such a confusing world. “I certainly am. One of the pleasures of being an actor is you can live in a clear narrative that’s moving forward from one position to another without such random and chaotic things happening.”

He raises Nataasha’s death directly after I chirpily ask if he’s still vegetarian. “To some degree, all my principles went out the window when my daughter died. I couldn’t quite see the point of anything. It seemed like nothing really mattered. Why the fuck does it, you know? So I’m only kind of recovering my sense that what I do makes a difference.” I stutter condolences. “Well, lots of people have very difficult things happen.”

Van Kampen continued to write a play, Farinelli and the King, which had a run last month at candlelit Globe annex the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and will transfer to the West End in the autumn. Rylance is Philippe III of Spain, whose mood-swings were eased by the singing of legendary castrato Farinelli, whom he took along when he set up home, Good Life-style, in the woods.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest As Rooster Byron in Jerusalem. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

The play can be read as a manifesto for the couple’s ideas about the consolation of art and mutual benefits of a respect for nature. Rylance is excited about medical breakthroughs using sound and vibration to treat cancer and Alzheimer’s. About how gravity can “lift the oceans as well as sensitive souls on a full moon night”. About the power of energies too subtle, he thinks, for us yet to have purchase on.

The more you talk to Rylance, the more those two big pieces of received wisdom – the virtuosity and the eccentricity – do seem symbiotic. Usually, they’re seen as oppositional: great actor, shame about the native American blessing rituals. But Rylance’s eager suspension of disbelief in all areas is key to his ability. Says his friend Richard Olivier: “The open-mindedness that he lives creates a non-judgmental approach to his characters. Of all the actors I know he is the closest to a modern shaman.”

And when you ask people to identify exactly Rylance’s skill, it’s this sense of something slightly supernatural that stands out. Jerusalem author Jez Butterworth says the moment Rylance first transformed into Johnny Byron was “the closest thing to magic I’ve ever seen”. Simon McBurney says he’s often asked what Rylance’s secret is, “as if they need the answer to a mystery”. As for Penn, he reckons that as Rylance’s “craft has caught up to his personal poetry, he’s probably the closest thing to a magician we have in the field”.

Oh yes, says Rylance, he believes in magic. Not in the kind that’s “an extension of the dominating mindset” but just “a very present and awakened state of being”. Prospero didn’t cause the storm, he merely channelled it. That’s how it is for him, too, he says, eyes glistening. “Ideas come to me that I do not feel are self-generating. As an artist, you receive ideas from the collective consciousness.” As a person, too.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rylance with a newly-discovered copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, February 2015. Photograph: Sarah Lee/Guardian

Once, he says, he was visiting a crop circle at the same time as a Mayan woman from Peru. Everyone else went in; she lay prostrate on the edge. “‘There’s no way I’m going in that thing with all that energy,’ she said. ‘If this happened in my country, they’d have built a stadium around it and it would be packed all the time with people just sitting there, looking at it.’”

His face creases in frustration: as if someone crossed a Schnauzer with a pixie. “Our fact-based culture is so terrified by anything mysterious or inexplicable. Being curious outside the set cosmology is still something of a sin. And it’s hard for those people to be faced by mockery and lies, to diminish the question. Life is so much more beautiful and undefinable than our culture seems to admit to.” He grins, shrugs, fishes out the olive, pops it in his mouth. “Though of course what’s nice is you can go to these places and there aren’t a lot of people there.”

• The Gunman is released in the UK and US on 20 March