It's not the most pertinent place to be sitting talking about death, horror, the scariest films ever made and the precise tools and vegetables best employed by sound studios to recreate the breaking open of a human head. It's a bright sunny day in a quiet Southwark street, and we're enjoying a Friday afternoon tapas lunch in the window of Mar I Terra, a sweet Spanish place smelling gently of coffee and roasted peppers and welcomely if unaccountably – because the food's pretty good – empty. Apart from one couple bibulously set on making a whole afternoon if not evening of it, and me and Mr Jones.
The lack of clatter and clamour is partly why I was able to recognise him. Toby Jones is one of our most feted actors, and you'll certainly recognise some of his roles, his scene-stealing in Tinker Tailor, or The Hunger Games, or as Karl Rove in W, or Truman Capote in Infamous, or Swifty Lazar in Frost/Nixon or even, albeit in voice only, Harry Potter's house-elf, Dobby – but he's not as street-recognisable as many other British actors in their mid-40s.
In person he looks similar but different to all of them – not tall, certainly, but better-looking than parts he's often played, cool intelligent eyes in a just slightly squashed face. And I think the quietest, most thoughtful, modest with little to be modest about actor I've met, which isn't meant to be a relativistic putdown.
I tell him how astonishing it is meeting the real different him having just watched his mesmerising performance as Alfred Hitchcock in the forthcoming The Girl, the tale of the director's attempted seduction of the then unknown model Tippi Hedren during the filming of The Birds. He laughs.
"Goodness, what a massive amount of makeup. There's a brilliant prosthetics team out where we shot it in Cape Town. Four hours of prosthetics every morning, the jowls and the nose, and it was very hot so they're having to attend to it all day, and you're still petrified of so many things, such as, can I speak properly? Hitchcock never quite lost those East End vowels, even though he had the softened California consonants. I work best when a little scared, when there's so much more than the lines to think about."
I finally let him stop talking long enough for him to look at the menu, and he generously urges me to order for us both. But as he doesn't eat meat, and he's the guest, I insist he goes instead, and his choices were swift, sure and, by and large delicious, though I hate squid and he loves it. Loves most food, and does cook, but "I'm a recipe cook. I live with someone who is instinctive, brilliant [his partner is a criminal defence barrister], but we can't cook together." Same story, he says, with his father, who is the great character actor Freddie Jones (best known for his role as Sandy Thomas in Emmerdale): "He's a truly good cook, but again, not in the same room as me please. I just go – please, please don't touch that, I'm measuring it."
He has also, he says, been lucky enough in his travels, when filming abroad, to seek out a few little spots he remembers.
"When working abroad you work pretty hard, but with time off, this is the greatest job in the world. You drive. You explore Memphis, or wherever you've landed, or go and see Dr John, or the Californian landscape. And, yes, I've had a few good meals. On set, it's not that you eat badly, just that it's often at truly odd times, so if you get an evening off you try to find…" he hesitates a little before telling the next story, and I realise later this is because he'd hate to be seen as a name-dropper.
"Best ever was filming in Barcelona last year, and I had a couple of scenes with De Niro. He's a very shy man. Speaks so quietly that people tend to bend down and adopt the same tone, almost the same voice, whenever they talk to him – watching, you'd think someone's offering to carry out a hit for him when they're just offering him a cup of coffee. Shy, but get him on restaurants and he simply fires up, I think he owns about 22, and he couldn't believe I hadn't been to El Bulli. So he just lifted his phone, got three of us a seat – and it was simply astonishing, a remarkable experience."
But before Hitchcock there's another of his recent works, the film Berberian Sound Studio, which he is rather keen to talk about, and during which his love of the eclecticism of the roles he plays manages to shine through.
"It is a majorly independent film. I'm happy people are starting to respond to it because, to be honest, it's the kind of film where people go, well, I don't know what's going on there. It's about a sound recordist working on a gory horror film who sort of – or does he? – puts a hex on himself by the brilliance of his special effects. I loved it, loved doing it even if it gets a bit… odd. Berberian's the kind of movie I used to love going to see, and I became passionate about doing it, because I like to be in as many different kinds of project as humanly possible."
He hadn't foreseen this career. Because his father was an actor, "there was always an element of not wanting to be one, because that's what he did." While at Manchester University, however, where he was studying literature and drama, he says he began to realise – there are long pauses, and only partly because he's eating; this is not gabbling man, he likes to consider everything he says: "That, though theatre may be shrinking, drama as a field is expanding more and more into other disciplines, so we should study them. The way we see ourselves in the world, use the language of roleplay, the rise of psychoanalysis, the way we talk about ourselves; it might not be theatre but it's all drama."
It was about then that he had a career-changing stroke of luck or prescience, leaving Britain for the Lecoq drama school in Paris. "Few things have changed my life more. I'd been very sceptical at home about The Method – all the interior theorisings of acting, plugging into the unconscious, hmm."
Instead, he learnt about rhythm, physicalities and keen observation, very far from Stanislawski, and those lessons he is utterly happy to acknowledge as having let him become characters he didn't physically resemble. Mo Mowlam's doctor, for instance, or Hitch, or the many celebrities he had to pretend to badly "impersonate" during the triumphant stage show The Play What I Wrote.
Is it a conscious aim, I mutter rudely through a small piece of attempted squid that's kept me chewing for long minutes, though all the rest was pretty tasty – to be able to play any role? "That's the fantasy that most actors consciously or unconsciously engage with, to want to know you could if necessary do anyone, though Romeo may not come my way, I've come to terms with that. Nor Bond.
There's a rueful smile, but he strikes me as incredibly happy in his own skin. "Actually," he smiles as fine hot coffee arrives, "I didn't even think I was short until about six years ago, when people started writing about it."
The week after I meet him, Jones is off to LA to, among other things, meet Tippi Hedren, apparently very pleased with the Hitchcock.
"She was concerned that, while it's agreed these things happened, she stresses that he was great fun, that he shouldn't be too dark, and that she managed to deal with him in her own way."
But she won't recognise you!
A soft laugh. "Oh, I hope not.
Berberian Sound Studio is released on 31 August; The Girl will be broadcast by the BBC later this year
