Colin Firth on A Single Man

Colin Firth on the film that has seen him win the best actor Bafta, the directorial debut of fashion designer Tom Ford

Colin Firth's heartfelt performance in Tom Ford's directorial debut, A Single Man, has attracted Firth's first Oscar nomination, for Best Actor, amongst legion other shiny plaudits. Not bad for a chap first famed for jumping into a lake in old-timey clothes and inflaming the passions of Bridget Jones-a-likes the world over. Set in the US in 1962, in A Single Man, Firth plays English college professor George Falconer, a man struggling to mourn the death of his male lover in an intolerant society. Firth doesn't feel there's been as much progress in that area as we might hope.

"I don't feel, frankly, that all that much has changed. Obviously it's on a state by state basis in America but the whole business of gay rights is shifting there all the time. Interestingly, we were actually filming on the day when Proposition 8 was passed in California, which essentially rescinded gay marriage rights. And this was the same day actually that Barack Obama won the election." Given this, would it have been interesting for Ford to have updated Christopher Isherwood's original story and used a contemporary setting instead?

"That's a very difficult one to answer. I don't think LA's changed that much, really. This character happens to be gay, but although George is struggling with a lot he's certainly not struggling with his sexuality. Isherwood's characters don't seem to. So I don't know what it would have done to the film if you'd have set it in the present. You take the Cuban Missile Crisis out and put something else there, like the fear of terrorism, it's actually rather an interesting question."

Firth's character, George Falconer, lectures his student on the politics of fear, seeing his sexuality as inspiring fear in the small-minded. Although much of the film is about grief, is fear, as an emotion exploited both then and now for political ends, the real heart of the story? "There's that theme of fear running through it which George talks to his students about," Firth explains. "I think it's very much alive today, it's a marketing tool and a political tool. I think it's how governments get things done."

"That's what Naomi Klein talks about in The Shock Doctrine. If you frighten people enough to can get any legislation through, you can make them put with the Patriot Act, or Guantanamo, or the invasion of a country that should be left alone. Or indeed giving up your civil liberties, or putting up CCTV cameras everywhere. People are prepared to accept all that if they're frightened." It's a world away, perhaps, from the type of thing one might expect of a fashion designer's first film. But Firth wasn't too concerned with Ford's reputation as a designer.

"I'm not connected to that world, so I didn't know that much about him. I knew the name, I'd met him a couple of times, I think I knew he ran a big fashion house but I probably would have struggled to have told you which one. I knew he did glasses, but that was it." Certainly there was no attempt from Ford's leading man at their first meeting to compete in the style stakes. "Do you know, you can't get close. You can't match him at his own game, and also I don't think he wants to see a world of Tom Ford clones running around. You can feel scruffy in your best suit and tie standing next to him, he's so perfect. I came straight from a film set anyway, I was a bit tired, I was a bit unshaven, and in some really rough looking clothes. And I got the part."

Watch red carpet premiere footage from A Single Man
Watch the A Single Man trailer