"I like all sports," says actor Kevin Smith. "There’s something magnificent, in a gladiatorial sort of way, about it." There are codes of honour and courage and heroism - Smith also loves westerns, "they embody the best we can be", and he has cultivated an image as The Bloke - but there is also the dismal reality of failure.

The wind is icy and raw and the sky is lead. Two days earlier the All Blacks had taken a pasting from France. "I was sad," he says. "I wasn’t angry. I was angry later."

Angry at who? "I rail into the teeth of the storm. Why??!! I don’t blame anyone. I know what it’s like to be criticised by people who wouldn’t get out of their armchair and do what I do. I’m not an All Black and it’s ridiculous for me to call someone a bum for dropping a ball."

We keep coming back to sport - it’s magnificence, its mythology. Smith has just wrapped a film called Jubilee, directed by his friend Michael Hurst. He plays an All Black, he wears the uniform. "You’re aware of how iconic the whole thing is. I would have been mortified if an All Black had come out and caught me wearing the gear. A handful of men have earned those."

It’s holy, obviously. "It’s a very delicate touch. My first reaction when Michael asked me was, yes, yes, of course. But you have to take some care with it. For a start, not playing him like a meathead. The number of times I see people play All Blacks on sketch shows as meatheads. That’s why we’ve never made the great New Zealand rugby movie. Everyone’s too scared. How do you even approach that?"

Somehow, being the god of war is less intimidating. For several years, Smith has made a tidy living, and brought fanatical devotion upon himself, playing Ares (the Greek form of Mars) in Xena and Hercules. "Ares is a little bit like the English rugby team. Or the English at any sport. He’s the god of war, he invented it, and he gets his ass kicked all the time. It’s like Wales being so passionate about something they’re so poked at."

Kevin Smith is always busy. News has just come in that the crime-fighter show Lawless will be extended from a pilot to two telemovies next year. In it, he plays an undercover cop. This week, the film Channelling Baby is released and in it he plays a traumatised Vietnam vet against Danielle Cormack’s blind hippie. It’s a love story with supernatural overtones. It walks a slender line between an extraordinary sensitivity and extreme silliness. It will polarise audiences. It has Smith giving a performance with more emotional heft than he has carried before. It is a performance he is proud of; he expects "to cop a bit of stick over it."

He is so busy. There is the Theatresports gig, the music gig with the Wide Lapels, a band that contains Willy de Wit and is moving, Smith says, from jokey 70s pop covers to serious 70s rock covers. His work ethic is also serious. He married young, he had kids, he had to make commercial choices. He grew up in Timaru.

"I was never the golden child. Things didn’t come easily to me at school, I didn’t have many friends. There’s a set of twenty-something actors who are cool in that Pavement kind of way. I was never that and will never be that, for whatever reason. If I have an image, it’s a blue-collar Wasp thing. It’s partly my manufacturing as well."

There is also an image of - he hates this phrase - Kevin Smith as sex symbol. He is trying to live it down, although one suspects that posing for photos in mechanics overalls and grease may not help. "The irony is that my wife is going to laugh like a drain when she sees it. I’m mechanically inept.

"But the whole sex symbol thing has no meaning for me, because the people who buy into it don’t know me at all. I could be a total f—ing asshole.

"I was described by one Christchurch reviewer as a George Michael lookalike. When we did Desperate Remedies, I had to wear a codpiece. There was a thing in Felicity Ferret about how I wouldn’t take off the codpiece for the simulated sex scenes: ‘Rumour has it that sloe-eyed Kevin Smith has something of a craving for the feel of leather against his crotch.’

"For a start, I don’t know what sloe-eyed means."

His childhood heroes: Tarzan, Batman, Sherlock Holmes. Real-life heroes? "I never touted for work before, but I rang my agent in the States when I heard they were going to do a movie on the ‘96 Everest disaster, when Rob Hall died. When they cast, I had to be up for the part of Rob Hall. The story was so enormous. I read Into Thin Air.

"Hall could have got down himself, but he decides to stay with his client. He phones his pregnant wife, who’s sitting in front of a crackling fire in Christchurch, she’s speaking to him knowing that he’s going to die. I just...That story is just enormous. ‘I’m staying with you, I’m not going.’"

It is about honour. "As archaic as it may seem, I still put a lot of store in that kind of thing."

Which naturally brings us back to sport. The awful truth is that Kevin Smith may be a curse. In 1995, he won a Film and TV Award for Marlin Bay. "The awards were on the ve of the World Cup final. We were down at Ice TV, they had built a grandstand, Jon and Nathan said, come on down. I just remember, at the end of it, [writer] James Griffin and I put our awards on the TV, offering them to the gods of rugby. I remember collapsing with Alan Brough, crying the tears of grown men. I smashed a camera. We went berserk, we ran amok. This time I was at home, 20 minutes to go, and I could feel the rage, I said to my wife, ‘I’m going to bed now because I’m afraid of what I’ll do if I stay up.’

"I get nominated once every four years. On the year when there’s a World Cup of rugby. All I’m saying is, it’s happened twice now."

There is something much bigger at stake. The game is more important. "Oh, oh, more than personal glory. I’m Spock in The Wrath of Khan. I’m in there, blistering away, waving...The good of the many outweighs the good of the few."

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