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His explosive turn in Jerusalem won every award going. Now Mark Rylance is playing a 17th-century fool. He tells Mark Lawson about the highs and lows of a life in theatre

As a male actor who has won an award for playing Viola in Twelfth Night, Mark Rylance has always had a varied career. In the few years leading up to his 50th birthday last January, though, he entered a new phase of possibilities. The reviews and awards for his TV portrayal of Dr David Kelly, and for his stage performances in Jerusalem and Boeing Boeing, have lifted him from that limiting category of actors lionised within the profession to one for whom West End producers and film casting directors want to find projects.

Until recently, Rylance was most identified as a Shakespearean performer: he has Olivier awards for both that cross-dressed Viola and a Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, and was artistic director of the Globe Theatre for a decade. His run of modern plays â€" ranging from new scripts through Beckett's Endgame â€" was, he admits, a deliberate shift. "Really, from playing Hamlet at school at the age of 16 to leaving the Globe in 2005, I'd done a 30-year cycle in which a Shakespeare production had always just passed or was looming up. So I did want a break from it."

His interpretation of Jez Butterworth's Johnny "Rooster" Byron in Jerusalem â€" a shabby but charismatic fantasist, faced with eviction from his caravan in West Country woods â€" was a three-hour demonstration of how to use every inch of the body and note of the voice in creating a three-dimensional character. Rylance did most of the speaking, including some anecdotes lasting several pages of script, while also required to create a convincing limp, a West Country accent and suffer episodes of physical assault.

An oddity of the performance was that the physically slight actor looked huge and muscular on stage, twice the size that he now seems as he sits in a vegetarian restaurant in London. "People did comment on that," he says. "I had, for health reasons, taken on a physical trainer before it. Because my family has a history of heart attacks, and it became clear that I was either going to move towards that or make an effort to keep in shape. But I think you're right: there is something physically transformational in theatre. It's all about the posture and the attitude. There are many accounts in theatre history of people going to the dressing room of leading actors and being amazed by how small they are."

To a non-actor, the part also looked extraordinarily physically demanding. "I did let out a sort of 'Oh, fuck' when the curtain came down each time and I'd feel something shrug off. And my voice always felt on the edge of being gone by the Saturday night. I'd have no register left except a kind of growl right down there, like a blues singer and, if I tried to go higher, there'd just be air, which I'd never experienced before. So that was interesting."

Beckett and the beast

Johnny Byron is a questionable character, who deals drugs and possibly sex to teenagers, but both play and portrayal left moral judgment to the audience. Rylance did the same thing in his Bafta-winning TV role in Peter Kosminsky's The Government Inspector, about the weapons expert who died, apparently by his own hand, after being exposed in the row between Downing Street and the BBC over the government's dossier justifying war with Iraq. To many liberals, Dr David Kelly is a hero and martyr and might easily have been played as a saint. In Rylance's version, though, he was a complex and occasionally irritating figure; as with Jerusalem, this seemed an example of his ability to play people from the inside rather than the outside. "That's the idea," he acknowledges. "To play what someone is to himself rather than what he is to other people, which no one can ever truly know. With David Kelly, none of his family would meet me, but I did speak to colleagues and they said that he was likable but withheld: there was a huge area of unknowability about him."

In Jerusalem and The Government Inspector, Rylance has especially enjoyed working on new scripts. "I believe, although you can never be entirely sure, that I have a useful contribution to make to the shaping of the text. If only through saying: I don't understand why I say this or [why I] say it in such an extended way."

He is now in rehearsals for La Bête, a sort of Molière de nos jours: although written by a modern US dramatist, David Hirson, it is set in mid-17th-century France and composed in 116 pages of rhyming couplets. Rylance plays Valere, a troubadour who invades a royal acting troupe and challenges their traditional style of theatre. Though technically a revival, director Matthew Warchus is treating this staging as a work-in-progress. The role in the original of a French prince has been rewritten as a princess, allowing Joanna Lumley into the cast. It's a demanding text to learn and play, Rylance says, because "sometimes a 10-syllable line will be divided between five actors but has to be spoken like a single line. So it's like playing music in that way."

One problem that has come up in preproduction is that Valere, though the moral heart of the drama, is an idiotic actor who lacks self-awareness. Rylance confesses that he is finding it hard to do stupidity. The bookshop of John Calder, an early English publisher of Samuel Beckett, is around the corner from the rehearsal rooms, and a table in the La Bête HQ is stacked with editions of lesser-known Beckett fragments, bought by Rylance during lunch hours. He and some of the other actors have been performing them as warm-up exercises.

These purchases fit his reputation as a scholarly, serious man of theatre. More surprising to me is the prevalence during our interview of footballing metaphors, and of Manchester United references in particular. While running the Globe, Rylance tells me, he became fascinated by the management techniques of Sir Alex Ferguson. He later comments that a successful theatre company needs a "Paul Scholes" (a self-effacing and hard-working midfielder) as much as its "Wayne Rooneys".

The actor says his frequent invocations of Old Trafford are the influence of a former colleague at the Globe, an obsessive Man Utd supporter, but that he did find comparisons between running a team and an acting troupe useful. So are there directors who resort to Ferguson's notorious "hairdryer", in which the player feels the angry, hot breath of the manager in his face? Rylance says that there are some who work that way, although he declines to name living examples: among the dead, he cites, from anecdotal legend, John Schlesinger and John Dexter.

Rylance thinks it unlikely that he will ever run a theatre again and expects to be an infrequent director. "My aim now is to be a leader from the floor, as an acting member of a company. I believe in group creation." Might that not be irritating to directors? "Not to the directors I'd want to work with. I don't believe in directors' theatre in the old-fashioned sense. When I was at the RSC, I felt the older actors were actively discouraged from speaking to the younger actors, in case it broke the line of authority. Or the voice coach would tell you that you were having trouble because of the position your neck was in, and you'd say that the director wanted you to play the scene at that angle. And she'd say, 'I can't get involved.' I hope that kind of autocracy is going."

Returning to sport, Rylance smiles: "In fact, my team is the Green Bay Packers." This affiliation to a Wisconsin football team reflects an important aspect of his background. He was two when his family moved to the US, where his father had taken a job teaching English. "All through my childhood, I'd spend 10 months a year in America, coming back to London in the summer, where my parents would take me to the theatre. So this is a very romantic season and place to be opening a play for me."

Hollywood beckons

His first acting job, at 17, was in a company in Wisconsin, where, in a strange recurrent strain in his life, the local theatre professor and football coach had begun a project to rebuild Shakespeare's Globe in Milwaukee. Until early adulthood, he had a mid-west accent, which he still resurrects for American roles. He is intrigued to find that, in improvisational or standup comedy exercises, his Milwaukee tones often return.

A few weeks ago, Rylance went to Germany to start work on a Hollywood blockbuster â€" Roland Emmerich's Anonymous â€" where, in another of those echoes, the set was an exact recreation of Shakespeare's Globe. The premise of the film is that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays, a belief Rylance shares. This debate was recently revived by James Shapiro's book Contested Will, a powerful defence of Shakespeare's authorship. As a known advocate of the Earl of Oxford's case, Rylance received numerous calls from arts journalists asking him to comment. He says he hasn't yet read the book but is concerned by reports that Shapiro mocks the alternative cases: "I don't see why he needs to be rude about it."

In fact, when Rylance does read it, he may find common ground in at least the final chapter, where the professor acknowledges that large parts of the canon were not written by Shakespeare, but were almost certainly the work of collaborating dramatists, such as John Fletcher. Rylance is particularly interested in the theory that some of the surviving texts are based on transcriptions of performances, and so include variations introduced by actors.

"When I played Hamlet," he remembers, "I added the word 'Ah!' five times after what are usually Hamlet's final words â€" 'The rest is silence.' And Ian McKellen sent me a letter to the stage door, saying, 'Now, now, darling, you really do have to be silent after those words.'" Sir Ian did not leave a return address, so Rylance was unable to write back to him and point out that the five dying susurrations are in the folio edition of the plays, printed seven years after the writer's death. Rylance believes that they were added in performance by Richard Burbage, the first Hamlet.

From this autumn, there will be a sort of homecoming, with Rylance's longest spell as an actor in America: La Bête, already booked for Broadway, is expected to be followed by the American premiere of Jerusalem. The Green Bay Packers fan, however, is happy to have started all his recent projects in London. "The fearfulness and interference of the producers in New York is much greater. Matthew [Warchus] said that, if he had done all the various things all the producers asked for before the first preview of Boeing Boeing, it would have ruined the show."

It's another clash of theatrical styles to reflect on, as an actor with an increasingly broad range returns to rehearse a play about ways of playing.

La Bête previews at the Comedy Theatre, London from 26 June. Box office: 0844 871 7627

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