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John Hurt makes a convincingly cerebral spook in the new film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. But in real life, if he were in charge of MI6, we’d be in trouble. He’s too gregarious, too eager and far too puckish John Hurt doesn’t think he’d have made a good spy. “I’d have been terrible! Too transparent by half!” He scoffs happily, gimlet eyes a-twinkle. But surely actors and operatives share certain skills? A big wise head waggle. “Don’t forget there are two sides to performing. Finding the truth, but you also have to be transparent enough for the audience to see it. How many times have you seen a performance and thought: well, it seems to be meaning a great deal to you but it ain’t coming across to me? It is to be shared. This isn’t a grief for your own pleasure … Ah, coffee!” A waiter glides into the hotel suite, bearing a tray, offering milk. “No, no cow, thank you, James,” says Hurt, mistaking him for the film PR (they’re both slightly light on hair), twigging too late to explain. The waiter bows out, and Hurt pinkens with giggles. “Dear oh dear! So much for observation, baby!” It’s true: the longer one spends with Hurt, the more one feels that if he really were in charge of Her Majesty’s Secret Service – as he is in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – we’d be in trouble. He’s too gregarious, too eager to be easy company, too brimful of bonhomie. Try and pin him down on post-cold war paranoia and he just tries to steer things silly. He makes a convincingly cerebral Control in Tomas Alfredson’s doomy adaptation of the John le Carré thriller, but says that, personally, he found the plot hard to follow. “I need to see it again. But even when you’re losing the thread a bit you never lose interest in the film. Of course I have to think: is that just because I’m in it? If I were watching it in an auditorium would I just think: fuck this, I’m out of here? But I don’t think I would be. It’s not easy. You have to sit up straight.” Hurt’s Control is a more belligerent beast than his opposite number in the mammoth 1979 TV series, played by Alexander Knox. His is the first face you see on screen, cocked with suspicion, warning a colleague to trust no one (they’re trying to root out a mole). He dies before the opening credits have unspooled, but he’s there throughout in flashback, and the whole film feels freighted with his upset. “It causes Control a huge amount of pain that the camaraderie of those boys at the top should have been betrayed. And of course he wasn’t well and they all drank too much and smoked too much and were all living on the real edge.” Does Hurt think he’s someone, too, who inspires loyalty in others? “I don’t know whether I inspire anything in anyone. I don’t think like that, like Caligula: ‘Oh my God I must get up and inspire a few people! I must go out and shed a little light.’” In Tinker, and on its promotional tour, Hurt takes the mantle of veteran thesp, the ringmaster wrangling younger acolytes (Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, Ciarán Hinds). At 70, he is one of the grand dons of British drama, and content with it, despite the odd campy protest. “Each day as you get older there is a new perspective on life. It’s a progression of some sort.” A pause. “Or a procession at any rate …” He’s pleased with the word play. New in Hurt-world is quitting drink (he was once a boozing buddy of Francis Bacon and Richard Harris), and a new hobby, horticulture. Both are credited to the influence of his fourth wife, producer Anwen Rees Meyers, 25 years his junior. “I like the physical activity of gardening. It’s kind of thrilling. I do a lot of weeding. At one stage I had a sort of Richard Mabey moment where I suddenly got really quite upset by the fact that I was destroying life in order to make way for life I felt deserved to be there. Terrible! I thought: ooh that’s interesting, philosophically.” What did he do? “Well, I went on. Those weeds had had it. But they come up somewhere else. They’re wonderfully resilient.” Hurt shares their bounce. He’s been ripped up a few times, both professionally (Mel Brooks’s 1987 film Spaceballs, and the 2008 thriller The Oxford Murders) and personally (three divorces, the death of a fiance), but he’s nothing if not a hardy perennial, always popping back up, smelling of roses. There’s a puckishness to him – particularly if pictured alongside near-contemporaries Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen – which, despite those river-bed wrinkles, lends an impression of youth. Also fresh is Hurt’s edge of malice: remember his leering turn in Brighton Rock and those arch, vaguely depraved voiceovers for Dogville and for Manderlay? He actually appears in the new Lars von Trier film, Melancholia, as another sweet establishment deviant, dancing about at his daughter’s wedding with two dates, both apparently called Betty. Indeed his personal reputation isn’t wholly savoury – just before he went dry, he was booted out of Spearmint Rhino for “boorish behaviour” (quite an achievement, especially when you factor in the fame and the fact of being a pensioner). “I can see people get a bit wary of me,” he says. “Sometimes a bit frightened. People get very nervous. I try to put them at their ease. I say: look, I’m the last person to make anybody nervous, believe you me.” What’s it down to? “I think fame makes people a bit nervous. I’ve never changed the way I live, I still walk the streets, I don’t give a damn. And everyone’s very nice to me. But this new idea of being famous for no reason at all? I can’t actually get my head round it.” We talk about Facebook: he can’t fathom why people might want to celebritise their own lives. Might it be that people want others to care about them? Or at least to acknowledge their existence? “Just being noticed? That does herald a different kind of community. I think people should be protected from being made to feel that they want to know what somebody famous had for breakfast.” How? “By not telling them.” Hurt’s no fogey (his sons are barely out of their teens) but he ascribes a lot of the world’s current woes to lives lived too virtually. The recent riots in London, he thinks, are partly a product of too much time spent online, “playing games, all of which are phenomenally violent. It means people look at property and they don’t see it as part of their own society. “I’ve been saying for years that the biggest difficulty of the 21st century is going to be anarchism. There’s no question that the internet aids and abets that. People have had hard times before. It didn’t mean you just cocked a snook at society. The first sign of it was punk, which was the first youth movement that was negative, that said: “You don’t want us? Well, fuck you.” I don’t think anybody took enough notice of that, sociologically. Previous youth movements had optimism, hope, something to offer. But suddenly a generation came along saying: ‘we don’t feel wanted.’” Hurt sighs with empathy. He’s always been more of a jazzman, he says. “I suppose I’d have been called a beatnik. It was nice because it was more exclusive. It wasn’t a great fat rather stupid popular movement.” And the more one looks at Hurt the more central his essential hippiness seems. Check out those earth-tone tweeds, the golden fuzz of stubble. Clock, also, that chunky necklace, the silver bangle inscribed with a Julian of Norwich homily: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” (Hurt’s recitation is a rare moment of gamey oratory). He wants to be liked, to live and let live, and believes that “authority actually isn’t right”. He’s indignant at heavy-handedness and unafraid to say so. Cannes’s decision to ban Von Trier in the wake of his larky sympathising with Hitler was “pathetic … it was a joke! Just a joke. Lars is intuitively one of the most intelligent men I’ve met. I’d do anything for him. He feels things. It’s his perception I admire most.” What’s the quality Hurt most wishes he himself had? “I’d love to be one of those people who, whenever you see them, you feel pleased.” He doesn’t think he’s already that simpatico? “Oh, I can’t ask myself those questions, sweetheart, that’s for somebody else to say.” Our time is at an end: Hurt confers a hug, a couple of kisses, some parting gossip. It’s a butter-up. But still, I can’t imagine the person who wouldn’t feel better for seeing him. Except, perhaps, the head of HR at MI6. John Hurt Film adaptations Catherine Shoard guardian.co.uk