What drew you to The Pride?
The eloquence of the writing was just gripping—and I thought the structure was incredibly intelligent. It dramatizes a point—that the assumptions of a culture 50 years ago can still permeate and affect our culture now. To put it bluntly, I don’t often sit down and read dialogue between two characters that I think feels real and rich and heightened without being unnatural. So I was just sitting at home reading this stuff to myself and having a wale of a time. I love investigating a character who can not only lie to other people about who he is, but really, truly lie to himself about who he is.

Having worked here and in Britain, do you think Americans make much more of an issue of the fact that a character is gay than the Brits do? Especially when played by a straight actor?
I think probably it is more of an issue here. The tabloid press in the UK is as bad as it gets in terms of many things, but it seems to me that here in the States, there’s a particular fascination in terms of unearthing the idea that somebody might be gay. It’s not something I understand. It’s a strange form of paranoia.

You’ve played a number of literate heroes. Any roles that you’d love to play that are against type? Any dream roles that you’d love to tackle?
I think that I’m always interested in what I haven’t done. I see great variety in the roles I’ve played whereas some could say, “Well they’re all bookish hero types.” Wouldn’t everyone love to play a villain?

What kind of role would cause you the greatest panic?
There’s a certain kind of actor that can take a simple script and fill it with their own personality—I don’t think I could that. I’m reliant on decent material. If I can’t get off the page a strong sense of who this person might be I think, “What the hell am I going to do?”

You and Claire Danes married last summer in France. According to Mamie Gummer, the two of you bonded over Scrabble.
Really? That’s not the way I remember it. We all worked together on Evening—and it’s true there were certainly a few games of Scrabble played. As I remember it, Patrick Wilson (Angels in America, Little Children, Watchmen) was a killer player.

It’s Fashion Week in New York—any favorites you’re following?
“Following” would be putting it very strongly. I guess over the years I’ve made some friends in fashion and I love Christopher Bailey. The clothes he makes are beautiful.

So who’s going to win the Oscar for best director—Kathryn Bigelow or James Cameron?
That’s so political isn’t it? It has nothing to do with my opinion of the movie—you have to have the brain of a supercomputer to figure out the voting system. I’ll go with James Cameron. Because I think he’ll win.

Did you know Ben before you worked together on this play?
No, we met last year, but he was a big factor in my wanting to do the play.

Where do you guys hang out after the show?
Spacious would not be the word you’d use to describe the Lucille Lortel Theater, where we’re performing. We—me and Ben and Adam, the other actor in the play—share as a dressing room, half a corridor—so it’s not like we really need to catch up after the show to hang out. We’re pretty much on each other’s laps all the way through.

Did you have any hesitations about taking explicit gay roles?
Hugh Dancy: No.
Ben Whishaw: I think of it as a very hopeful play. It’s all about people wanting to know themselves better.

Still, Ben, your character says he’s into bondage, rubber, chains.
BW: Sure, I have thought about my mom seeing it. [To Dancy] Has that thought crossed your mind?
HD: Oh, God, yes. But people seem convinced that after I agreed to do the play, all my agents begged me not to. It’s just not true—not really.

What connections did you make between the show’s two time periods?
HD: That the self-loathing in the fifties has perhaps, in some way, remained and informed some element of gay identity.

So the trap that your character faces in 2008 is …
BW: Still very specifically about gayness. Or his sexuality. [My character] can feel love for one person, and still have sex with strangers in parks. It’s a problem.

Were you glad to see a mature Nazi fetish depiction in the script?
HD: Oh, I’ve been waiting.

Hugh, since you live in New York now, did you give Ben tips on what to do?
HD: I did give you the address of that Qigong place on Grand Street.
BW: Oh, yeah! That massage place. It was pretty good, but it could have been harder.

What kind of other support do you two give each other?
HD: I’ve never felt in great need of emotional support because we get on well.
BW: Yeah. If you make a big kind of [whispers nervously] “We’re doing the sex scene today,” you make it a drama. But actually we’re like, “Okay, we’re gonna do the sex scene! [Claps] So pull down your pants.” You have to be matter-of-fact about it.
HD: There’s a perception that in the rehearsal room, actors are always hugging each other and checking if they’re okay. I think it’s much more matter-of-fact, usually.
BW: But we do sometimes hug.

(Time Out New York) For an actor frequently described as “dreamy,” Hugh Dancy seems surprisingly well-grounded. In the past few years, Dancy’s star has been rising both in his native England and in the U.S.—an ascent that has not been impeded by the sharpness of his cheekbones or the softness of his sea-gray eyes. But it is his sensitive turns in such plays as 2008’s Journey’s End and such films as 2009’s Adam and that have really sealed the deal. This month, Dancy—who married fellow actor Claire Danes in September—opens in the American premiere of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride, directed by Joe Mantello for MCC Theater.

Did your agent raise any concerns about your taking three months off to do an Off Broadway play on gay themes?
If those thoughts ever arose, I’m grateful that they weren’t expressed to me. I was sent the play by MCC in June, and I thought it was one of the best new pieces of writing I’d read or seen onstage in a long time. January through March is a relatively short commitment. And theater is something I enjoy; it’s something you come away from a little richer, in every sense other than the literal.

Your father, Jonathan Dancy, is a well-known moral philosopher. Was there ever any pressure to go into the family business?
No, not at all. I don’t think—I’m trying to think of a polite way to put it—I don’t think he would have considered the effort worthwhile.

How do you think that growing up with a philosopher shaped you?
My dad encouraged us to ask questions of ourselves and our assumptions. One of the things I enjoy about theater is the experience you get in rehearsal: to sit with a play and beat it until the blood comes out of it, and figure out what the hell it’s about. You have to have that curiosity, and I guess in some ways that was instilled by my parents. Unfortunately, in film that’s not a given. You film everything out of order, and you haven’t often had a chance to bounce your ideas off other people. We’re none of us so good that in solitude we figure everything out.

The action of The Pride alternates between two time periods, right?
Yeah, it takes place in 1958 and 2008. There are three characters, Philip, Sylvia and Oliver—I play Philip—whom you see in ’58 and then you see again in ’08, played by the same actors. They’re different incarnations of the same people, with different dynamics between them, but in each era it’s a triangle of sorts.

So the ’08 Philip is openly gay, but the ’50s Philip is in the closet?
I don’t think of him as a closeted gay man. He thinks it’s a perversion, it’s criminal, it’s a sickness; he truly can’t conceive of the notion that it’s part of who he is. And being in denial is not the same as being in the closet. Truly, truly not. Somebody who has built up an incredibly complicated series of defenses around his whole psyche to prevent even himself from looking at it—that’s catnip for an actor.

The closet is being dismantled in a lot of places these days, but it is still in force for many actors.
It still seems to overwhelm people’s sense of the rest of your identity. If an actor is gay, then they are a “gay actor.” It’s not like being a blond actor or a very short actor—those things can be dealt with in people’s imaginations. And there is this strange cultural obsession, this eagerness to unmask people.

You have had to deal with a few such rumors yourself.
You could spend your whole life just trying to clear up other people’s perceptions of you, but it would be a great big waste of time. I just can’t bring myself to care very much. It’s a kind of self-preservation: You cannot hope to control what other people think or say about you.

Outing used to be largely about conservatives going after supposed subversives; now it’s often gay people calling out people who they feel are not being subversive enough.
Yes: that they’re hiding, that they’re sacrificing the greater good for the sake of their careers. It’s a subject that people are incredibly passionate about. But when I read this play, that’s not what grabbed me about it; it’s all there, but I didn’t think, Oh, fantastic. It’ll be so interesting to get into sexual politics. I just thought that this one man—and the construct and lies that he’s created for himself—would be very rewarding to examine. Maybe some people will feel we’re not making the right argument on behalf of gay rights or whatever. But I’d like to think we’ve all got beyond that.

The Pride is at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.