Age: “I shall start the play in my 20s and end in my 30s,” says Field. He turns 30 in April.

Currently: Playing both Hugo, a young man about town, and Frederic, his identical twin brother, in Jean Anouilh’s 1947 French classic Ring Round the Moon. The play was first produced in London in 1950, when it was directed by Peter Brook and starred Paul Scofield. The show has now returned to the West End for the first time in over 40 years, in a new production directed by Sean Mathias. “I had an audition with Sean about a year ago,” Feild recalls, “and I realised I was doing really badly. I said to him, ‘I’m sinking a little here’. He said, ‘Darling, you’re drowning!’ I thought that was it. But then they changed venues and dates, and I got a call from the producer asking me to have a drink with him, and he said, ‘Let’s do the play.’ So drowning obviously worked.”

Hometown: “I was born in Boulder, Colorado, but I came here as a baby,” says Feild. Partly because of his place of birth and his parentage—his dad is British but his mother is American—he has dual nationality. “I had an American passport long before I had a British one,” he notes. It comes in handy now that he divides his time between the U.K. and America. “I live in L.A. part of the year as well,” he explains. “I have an apartment there as well as in London. I enjoy living in two different places. I’ve had a fun couple of years of being on the road: I did four films in the year just gone, and the year before that, I did four costume dramas for TV, but it’s lovely to be home and having a routine now.” One of his routines involves exploring London: “I’m loving walking through Trafalgar Square every day,” he exclaims. “I actually get off the tube a couple of stops early so I can meander through town. It has been such a spring-like winter, and I’m just loving wandering around and pottering in and out of places. I can’t wait till we have even longer days, so I can discover London again and see spring arrive.”

Leaving Normal: “Not one member of my family has anything to do with acting,” admits Field. “I have two older brothers and a younger sister, and they all have really normal, wonderful lives. They are completely excited for me, but they think I’m barking!” His passion for acting started young. “I think it might have been my mother’s fault. When were kids, she dumped us off at the Unicorn Youth Theatre, to fill up some time—especially me. I was that kid with attention deficit problems at school—if they had Ritalin, I would been OD’ing on it. For me, acting was my way out, as somewhere I could channel my energy. And that is where I felt at home.” It was inevitable, he feels, that he would pursue it professionally. “I don’t ever remember making the decision; I just knew that this was all I ever wanted to do.” He trained as an actor at Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and after graduating, he was soon lured into film and television.

Theatre Muscle: Though his training was for the theatre—“we had three years of pure theatre and one day of screen training!” Feild has done very little of before now. His sole credit was appearing at Sheffield Crucible Theatre in a production of Six Degrees of Separation a few years ago. His lack of theatre credits was “not out of choice,” he states. “I very avidly wanted to do more stage work, but I found that because of the screen work I was doing, it was very hard to get into the door of the theatre world. So it wasn’t a personal choice that I was enjoying film more, but if you are away shooting all the time, you are not in people’s minds—and then the more time passes, people get suspicious of whether you can do theatre! Thankfully, Sean [Mathias] had no fears that I could.” Is he having to acquire new skills? “It has been a relearning process for me, but I was really relieved that the training I had had meant that it wasn’t alien at all. It’s like that cliché about riding a bike again—there was nothing that I had to learn from scratch, it was rather about honing that part of my technique again and like training a muscle again. I’ve loved falling back into it. I can honestly say that I feel I am in exactly where I want to be at this point in my career and my life.”

Double Duty: Feild has to do double duty in Ring Round the Moon. He performs two roles. “They’re twins, the flipside of each other’s coin. I think there are so many ways to play it—either as complete opposites or with a lot more in common that you’d think. I started the rehearsals taking them as polar opposites, but now at the end of it I realise they are brothers and cast in the same mould.” How does he differentiate between them? “At first I did a lot of very bad overacting, and found as many different forms of voice and physicality to make them stand apart from each other, but ultimately it is all in the writing. It is so apparent in the way they speak or how they interact with the people they are with. It’s amazing how much is unnecessary. I just need to trust the writing and the director and the great characters around me.”

Spell Check: Who—or what—is JJ? “That’s what my mother calls me! It’s not a dodgy actor’s affectation,” Feild proclaims. “My names are John Joseph, but everyone calls me JJ. When I left drama school, the principal said JJ was a silly name, so I registered myself as John Joseph Feild with Equity. But then the first job I did was an open air Shakespeare, and that’s how I was listed in the programme. The director of that told me that was a silly name, so I called Equity and went back to JJ.” Everyone tends to misspell his surname: type Feild and word autocorrects it to Field. “I’m on a 50 percent success rate,” he quips, “with whether it appears right or not.”