Denis Leary: King Leary

He's foul-mouthed, foul-tempered and fiercely funny. And, increasingly, he's big box office. John Walsh talks to the live wire Denis Leary about comedy, cinema, cigarettes, toe-clippers and, er, Elizabeth Hurley

"What makes me angry these days?" asks Denis Leary, his handsome face creasing into irritation behind his rock-star shades. "Depends which day you're talking about. Last Sunday night, it was the nosehair clippers.

"I was at JFK airport, and I could've done 15 minutes of stand-up just about the security guys and the people at the ticket counter. You know when you go through security, and they can take away anything that could possibly be used as a weapon, and you're not allowed to take it with you, they just throw it all into a big box? I took a look inside the box. There were about 67 pairs of toenail clippers and nosehair clippers in there. I mean, there's a limit to the amount of violence I could do with toe-clippers. Hell, I could stab you in the neck with them, and it might be fucking painful, but I'm not really likely to kill anyone with them..."

Denis Leary in full flight is an awesome spectacle. He rants and rails. He damns and blasts. He effs and blinds. He inveighs and vituperates. He does a good line in seethe and fume. He gets Homerically mad about everyday annoyances, like people bumping into you on the subway. For 16 years, he's parlayed his urban-psychotic fury into a stand-up comedy that alternates between the scorchingly satirical and the freezingly contemptuous. Smoking is a major theme. He loathes the anti-nicotine lobby and the people who put health warnings on cigarette packets. "I want a tracheotomy," he once told his audience, "so I can smoke two cigarettes at the same time."

Later, the Uzi of his scorn was trained on oafish drivers, about whom he made a record called "The Asshole Song" ("I like to park/ In handicapped places/ Where handicapped people/ Make handicapped faces/ I'm an asshole, dubba-dup-pa..."). He appeared on MTV, between rock videos, trashing new bands in 60-second bursts of denunciation. He turned up on British TV screens, snarling through a bracing series of commercials for Holsten Pils.

Inevitably, the system he so energetically abused took him to its bosom.While Leary was undoubtedly rude, scary and reckless, he was also tall and good-looking, and the film world grabbed him. He played the cop in The Thomas Crown Affair. He starred with Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman in Wag the Dog, and with Clint Eastwood in True Crime. And now he's in town to promote Double Whammy, an off-beat movie about a cop who gets involved with a murderous Mexican teenager, a pair of wacky movie screenwriters, and Liz Hurley as a lovely chiropractor in serious spectacles.

We met at the Dorchester in London, where he instantly pulled out his trademark Marlboro Lights and wondered (rather politely) if it was OK to smoke. He is studiedly cool-looking in a distressed leather jacket, Calvin Klein striped trousers and Timberland boots, but he kept a little perspex firewall between us by never removing his sunglasses. Perhaps he was feeling weary after the night before, when he linked up at a screening with Frank Skinner, his old friend and one-time flatmate, for some on-stage repartee and audience Q&A.

"A girl in the audience last night wanted to know just how filthy our apartment became. Frank wallows in that stuff. He remembered there were some plates stuck together so bad that when David Baddiel came over to visit and tried to clean up, he couldn't separate them, not after running them under a hot tap for 45 minutes..."

He is, predictably, no fan of Mayor Bloomberg of New York, who brought in the iniquitous smoking ban in Big Apple bars, restaurants, public areas and prisons. How is it working out? "The smoking ban, combined with his cutting eight fire-stations from the New York Fire Department, means that the mayor's disapproval rating is now worse than Hitler's at his worst moment in German history. The bottom line about Bloomberg is that he's very wealthy, but he doesn't really connect with people. He just makes these arbitrary decisions because he's the mayor and he can. The funny thing is, sales of cigarettes have gone up since the ban. At celebrity premiere parties, you get people like Sigourney Weaver smoking while they're being interviewed, and saying, 'I quit smoking but I took it up again in protest.' It's now a celebrity cause."

Leary is full of sympathy for "the out-of-work actors, dancers and artists who need the tips to live on" and who will suffer if the hip crowd stop going to bars and clubs because of the smoking ban. His conversation is unexpectedly full of public concern and charities and causes. He is a passionate supporter of the city's firemen, not because of September 11 but because his cousin, a fireman, was killed in an incident in 1999.

If you were mayor of New York, I ask, and could bring in arbitrary laws or ban things, where would you start? "I'd reverse the smoking ban and give a shitload of money to the firemen. But I used to say that, if I had a real-life cop badge, I'd need a trailer truck just for the people I'd pick up in the mornings. People who ride bikes on the sidewalk. Chinese delivery guys bumping into pregnant women while they're delivering food. Bad driving. Bad walking..."

You mean you'd criminalise jaywalkers?

"No, jaywalking's okay. That's cool. I mean tourists who walk around ve-ry slow-ly looking at the buildings while I'm trying to get to work."

It's that note of triumphant, don't-give-a-shit selfishness that characterises Leary, as if the whole world out there is conspiring to inconvenience him, and it's time he fought back. Brought up in Irish-Catholic circles in Worcester, Massachusetts, he's a connoisseur of sin. "If you wanna be funny," he says, "you've got to be involved with at least one of the seven deadly sins - greed, lust, anger, being caught lying or cheating - that's the stuff I love to play."

How disappointing, then, to find him playing such a counterhero in Double Whammy. Ray Pluto is a cop with a spinal injury that cripples him just as he's about to apprehend a psycho shooting up a Burger Bun franchise. He is named "Loser Cop" by the Manhattan tabloids, goes to an English chiropractor, (perhaps the only one in her profession who manipulates male patients while wearing a plunge-line lilac cardigan) and, more by luck than ability, fights off a brace of assassins.

Watching the energetic Leary playing this spavined nobody isn't a lot of fun. He's allowed one flash of filthy repartee (pointed up by some dah-dah music) and gets to roll around with Ms Hurley, but mostly he seems like Denis Leary with one of his batteries removed. There's a restaurant scene where he's having dinner with Hurley, who objects loudly about the people smoking at the next table. In the film, Ray does nothing. Denis would have given her a slap, surely? "Yeah, but that wasn't in the script," says Leary defensively. "I liked playing the guy. Tom DiCillo, who wrote and directed - he gave it all the elements of a typical cop drama and romantic comedy, but he constantly takes these left turns you don't expect..."

But Denis, I say, this is a cop who drops his gun and shoots himself in the foot, for Chrissake, this is a cop so dumb he lets himself be tied up by a couple of red-suited crackpots in the downstairs apartment. What attracted you?

"That's one of my favourite scenes," Leary says. "Tom was after a hero who's good-natured at heart but a bit of a fuck-up, who's wallowing in self-pity and too stupid to see that the brightest things are right in front of him."

Was this, I ask, the choice that Leary had to make now - to become a Hollywood leading man or to hang on to his blistering former stage-act? "No it's not," he rasps. "I don't like romantic comedies, and I don't go to see them. Leading-men roles don't appeal to me."

But you're a leading man in the new film, you're handsome and bruised and caring, you hug your partner and fall in love...

"Yeah, but I couldn't play that role without all the quirks," he says. "I couldn't do what Richard Gere does. I couldn't do what Hugh Grant does, God love him, it's not my cup of tea. I'd fall asleep halfway through. I'd be in a coma in my trailer. I gravitate much more towards fucked-up roles."

He and Hugh Grant have had an edgy friendship for a few years ("He's not a man's man," Leary said of Grant), given added spice by their status as joint godfathers (along with Elton John and three others) of Liz Hurley's baby, Damian.

Leary and Hurley met through the film, and their intense amitié amoureuse kept American and British gossip columns buzzing last year when she was having a spot of bother with the caddish Steve Bing. Only a madman would ask Denis (happily married, with a wife called Ann and two children, Jack and Devlin) if he and Liz were an item, but their on-screen chemistry is pretty sulphuric, especially when she clambers on to his recumbent form on the treatment table, and his hands knead Ms Hurley's peerless hindquarters.

When did he first meet her? "Mutual friends kept saying, 'You guys should hook up, you'd get on really well. The truth is, she's got a lot of Irish blood in her, like a lot of the girls I grew up with, and the first time we met, we ended up in one of my favourite Irish bars in New York, talking music trivia. She could phone her sister in London at 3am (because it was 8am in London) to ask what was Haircut 100's third-biggest hit. I had nobody to call because they were all in bed..."

Leary introduced her to DiCillo, who agreed she would be perfect to play Ann the Brighton bone-setter with the unfeasibly large spectacles. These days, he plays stand-in father to Damian (to the extent of changing nappies) and attendant lord to Liz. "The arrangement is very practical," Leary says. "Hugh's the official London godfather. When Damian's in New York, I'm sort of in charge - and Elton's constantly here, there or in between, so it works out." He and Liz see each other twice a month, and are developing projects that will combine their production companies.

You have the most extraordinary platonic relationship, I say - sort of When Hurley Met Leary. No wonder people are so intrigued... Dead silence from Leary.

He has another movie out in two weeks, called The Secret Lives of Dentists, a comedy directed by Alan Rudolph, who made Welcome to LA, and starring Leary as the Bad Guy ("It's pretty over the top - you don't know if I'm doing the things I'm doing or if it's just the fever dreams I'm having"). So, will he ever go back to stand-up comedy, or is he lost to the movie machine?

"The trouble is, I have to tour for six months to get the show right, then bring it to New York for a two-week run, then fine-tune it for HBO [the TV network], then bring out the album... It's very time-consuming. But I do two or three charity gigs a year, for a friend's foundation and for Michael J Fox's Parkinson's disease charity, at least 20 minutes of stuff every year, because it keeps me fresh for whenever my schedule opens up and I can go back." But what is it that gets him going on stage, that kicks him from nought to 60 in three seconds?

"You wanna know?" Leary says. "Doing a live show, it's the easiest adrenalin rush of all, because at 8pm the show starts, at 8.01 the lights go on, and your head starts dancing. Fear is the greatest motivator of all. The minute you hit the stage, a fear muscle in the comedian's mind juices immediately into the forefront of your brain, feeding you stuff - whether it's the guy in the front row or something you read in the paper, your brain knows you're standing in front of a thousand people and you're going to look a fucking idiot if you don't have something to say."

The very idea of the irascible, asshole-bating Leary being stuck for a subject is laughable. Not while there are airports to visit, not while there's a neighbourhood, non-smoking bar. Not while there are all these assholes all over the place.

'Double Whammy' opens on Friday