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"I want to stop paying tax, until everyone pays tax,” the actor Greg Wise is saying. His hands are imploring claws, rigid in the space between us. “I have actively loved paying tax, because I am a profound f****** socialist and I believe we are all in it together. But I am disgusted with HMRC. I am disgusted with HSBC. And I’m not paying a penny more until those evil bastards go to prison.”

He shakes his head then adds of his “missus”, Emma Thompson, the Oscar-winning actress, “Em’s on board. She agrees. We’re going to get a load of us together. A movement. They can’t send everyone to prison. But we’ll go to prison if necessary. I mean it. It’s going to be like 1848 all over again.”

And then he laughs, disarmingly. “I sound like Russell f****** Brand, don’t I?” Yes, I say. But he’s not a bit like Russell f****** Brand. He’s far too tortured, far too self-aware. And, of course, he’s a lot better looking.

We meet in a bar in the Café Royal in Regent Street, Wise, 48, smouldering and unshaven, stirring his cappuccino furiously. He’s wearing an inky hoodie and jeans and paws them to show the stains — “look, here and here, and look at these old boots”. His jacket “is from filming Taggart — a Scottish TV programme I did 30 years ago”.

He’s dishevelled because of the toll of four weeks rehearsing Kill Me Now, his first play in 17 years. “It’s a very taxing piece of work, very full-on emotionally and especially physically. It’s about fathers and families and love and co-dependence, letting go, and support. It’s about being alive.”

He didn’t reveal the plot to Thompson before the first night because he wanted her to experience it raw. “She’s still crying. She had to be scraped off the f****** carpet. But with that came an understanding of where I’d been for the last month.” Did they discuss it afterwards? “Yuh.”

The play — about a man’s relationship with his disabled son — resonated, he says. “It’s about responsibility and being over-responsible. The dad uses this as a way of not having a life. And we all do that. As with all loving relationships in one’s life, parenting can veer to being unhealthy.”

Wise spent the first few years of his daughter Gaia’s life “being Mr Dad … I probably used Gaia as a way of not doing things, saying ‘No, I’ve got to be around’, instead of filming abroad for a few months. But she was such a fantastically wanted child — an IVF baby — we thought, ‘We got our chance, we’ll do it as well as we can’.”

Returning to work, he was “reasonably surprised”, to discover that “you take two years out, you come back and they go — ‘Sorry, you are?’ And you say, ‘Well, I used to be …’ And then you have to start scrabbling from the bottom again. There’s the old knock, knock joke: ‘Knock, knock’. ‘Who’s there?’ ‘Greg’. ‘Greg who?’ That’s showbiz.”

He’s given up acting “three times” — “I’ve always been slightly arsey”. Recently his life has been “trimmed” because Gaia quit fee-paying Highgate School to be tutored at home. “It was her idea. She’s a product of people who aren’t part of the system — we’re self-employed, very much on the fringes of what is seen as a proper job — and having been brought up in that environment, and questioning things, Gaia just decided that she loves learning but the system per se is not for her.”

They didn’t want to “keep sending an unhappy child out of the house”, so Wise, who initially trained as an architect, built “a little schoolroom in the garden. The more disparaging tutors call it ‘The Shed’ but it’s a posh little space: it’s got electrics, heating, wi-fi.” After her exams, he says, “it’s going to become my man cave”.

The family live in West Hampstead, “in the poor bit. Em was born at the bottom of the street and now we live in the middle.” Her mother, Phyllida Law, is “over the road, and my sister Clare is about 10 doors down”. Their evening meal is “sacrosanct” and they share the cooking. “We have six or seven every night for tea. It’s how everyone used to live. [Society] has designed that out and it’s not healthy. As the Africans say, ‘It takes a village to raise a child’.”

Family includes Tindy Agaba, the Rwandan refugee Thompson and Wise took under their wing 13 years ago. “He’s a powerhouse of an activist,” Wise says. “He speaks six languages, he’s got a politics degree, an MA in human rights law and he’s set up his own charity in Cairo.” He did a short stint at Bono’s charity One, which he didn’t …” Wise pauses to get this right. “It didn’t fulfil the things that he felt he needed to be doing, so he left.”

Tindy is now 28. “Same age as I was when I got together with Emma,” Wise marvels. They met on the set of Sense and Sensibility in 1994, when Thompson was splitting up with her husband, Kenneth Branagh.

“There was a screening of Sense and Sensibility at the weekend at the Tricycle,” he says. “I hadn’t seen it for 20 years, and f***, it’s a good film. I was looking at us, these children. It’s romantic to think we’re still here struggling on.”

It’s often said that Wise’s career took a back seat to Thompson’s but he probably doesn’t see it like that? “Um, well, ah,” he smirks. “Put it like this: I don’t think there’s any such thing as a ‘career’. There’s a series of choices.”

Did he ever feel like a beta male? “I met Em when she was an Oscar-winning film star and she still is an Oscar-winning film star and I’m still doing the stuff I do. There’s no comparing. I’m comfortable in who I am. I don’t need to willy-wave.” He continues: “At school I played rugby for the school team and I sang in the choir. I was a ‘choir poof’, as they called it in pre-PC times, and a rugger bugger. I thought: ‘Why can’t I do both?’”

The couple take off to their cottage on the west coast of Scotland “for around three months a year”, and Wise also goes alone, “so that I can get up at silly o’clock and be in a woodshed splitting logs, be in the workshop making extraordinary amounts of noise with the power tools, or out on the hill cutting trees, or building bridges or whatever.” He smokes his own mackerel, caught at the end of the pier.

“I’m best feral,” he says. “When I don’t wash. I’m a bit of wild man. I whittle. I have a welder now. I am going to get a lathe. After the play I’m going to go up to Scotland and really sort the workshop out and learn how to use a lathe.”

He loves Scotland. “There’s a great quote on a grave stone somewhere– ‘all things considered, I’d rather be in Dunoon’. That’s the same with me.”

Wise grew up in Northumberland. His father — Douglass, an architect — was “stoic and northern”, his mother “fiery and Hungarian”. “That’s the interesting tensions within me,” he says. The ups and downs of their relationship left him, for a long time,“feeling responsible. They rowed. A lot.”

Therapy has taught him, “that you’re responsible for very few things. Whatever garments you put on as a child you wear until you start to explore and say, ‘Why am I still wearing this T-shirt? It isn’t really mine, is it?’ It’s about taking off clothes that aren’t yours.”

He’s not “the Woody Allen-type” of therapy junkie, but says, “it’s weird that people are so bloody embarrassed about exploring mental health issues. We are very capable of telling mates about operations but as soon as it’s the brain we get terribly coy, which is just daft.”

We return to politics. Wise is card-carrying Labour. “But I’m in absolute despair at all of them,” he says. “I liked Tony before he made his mistakes. I cannot forgive him and the party, and the country. I was one of the two million out there, marching. Made f*** all difference. There is no such thing as democracy.”

Injustice is, he says, “the thing that makes me more angry than anything — whether it’s someone being hassled in the street to HSBC getting away with this. I’m the least violent man you’ve ever met but I will plough into fights in the street to stop someone being set upon. Days afterwards I’m a mess because I hate violence. But I cannot see injustice.”

The issue of tax has him frothing. “Yes, I’ve got my basic north London Left-wing woolly ideas about what’s going on. [Companies like] HSBC haven’t even been slapped on the wrist [because of this] beautiful grey area between avoidance and evasion. It’s iniquitous. We need to do something — COME ON!”

Kill Me Now runs at Park Theatre until 29 March, parktheatre.co.uk