Cuba Gooding Jnr rises to greet me with the careworn air of a junior doctor about to deliver bad news. Not a trace of the you're-extremely-privileged-to-meet-me of the star. If this were an audition he wouldn't get the part.
A press agent, all toothpaste smile and short-skirted professionalism, will be sitting in on the interview, I've just been told. When I protest that such precautions are not deemed necessary this side of the Atlantic, her smile merely hardens and Gooding's brow folds into its trademark frown. If the name Cuba Gooding Jnr conjures up the sharp-talking, prat-falling, footballer-with-heart who rescued the Tom Cruise vehicle Jerry Maguire from movie limbo and won Gooding an Oscar, then think again. His voice barely rises above a whisper. A bare 5'10" and no muscleman, Gooding is a far from an obvious choice for American wouldbe football star Rod Tidwell: the performance simply confirmed Cuba Gooding as an actor of extraordinary talent, and an equally extraordinary ability not to take no for an answer.
Fighting to get roles is part of Gooding's stock in trade. Movie egos are famously fragile, and actors prepared to admit that they were not a director's first choice or were pipped at the post by someone else are as rare as pelicans in O'Connell Street. Gooding is the exception. He tells me that his role in Instinct, that of an ambitious young psychiatrist sent to report on a zoologist accused of murdering six people in the jungles of Rwanda, was first offered to Mel Gibson and Tom Hanks. Although an opportunity to work with Anthony Hopkins is no doubt appealing, the part itself, I suggest, is hardly challenging. So why did he do it? "It was the first time I was offered a role that was a lead role. After the Academy Award I'd been offered a lot of interesting minor characters in a lot of different movies, but here was an opportunity to walk the audience through the story. I think there were only four scenes that I wasn't in the whole movie. And that to me was my goal when I first started doing films." Cuba Gooding Jnr comes from a showbiz background. His father - Cuba Gooding without the junior - was lead singer with the 1970s group The Main Ingredient. His mother was a backing singer with Jackie Wilson's The Sweethearts. After a walk-on part in Coming To America, in 1991 Gooding landed the lead in John Singleton's groundbreaking Boyz N The Hood, the movie that shed harrowing yet compassionate light on life in a part of America - the black ghetto of South Central LA - that most people only knew from homicide statistics. "I started with Boyz N The Hood, where the character took you on the journey, and then I dropped away from that, not by choice but by the things being offered.
"Then I won the Academy Award for Jerry Maguire and got this script and went after it. I met with the director and was passionate about the character. Still the studio was a little truculent, saying that they didn't know that I could carry the film."
Eventually good sense prevailed, though not, he admits, before the script for Instinct was "trimmed" to reflect casting a black actor in a white-written role.
What does he mean by trimmed? "They trimmed the relationships, to make it more mainstream, they say, to not deal with any issues I guess." Not to put too fine a point on it, the relationship between the psychiatrist and his patient's daughter, which would undoubtedly have ended in romance had Mel or Tom been in the frame, remains resolutely unspoken and chaste.
I put it more bluntly. No kissing? He nods, brow furrowed in those hallmark creases. "Right, right." Because of your colour? "I don't want to say it was a conscious choice but I know that, first script they sent, it was there. So maybe that was the reason why, who knows, I just know that from my perspective there were things that were tailor-made." Frankly, from this viewer's perspective, the lack of rosy-lensed romance in the subplot is a huge relief. But a Hollywood movie is rarely a sex-free zone and the revelation is even more bizarre, given that in real life Mrs Cuba Gooding (Sara Kapfer) is white, his highschool sweetheart who, until their two children were born (now two and four) was a primary school teacher. His young family is clearly the most important thing in Cuba Gooding Jnr's life and three weeks is the maximum time he is prepared to be away from home - his own childhood was devastated when his father walked out. Fame may have brought him financial security, but the price has proved high. The intrusion into his family's personal life by the press, or simply by people disturbing him in a restaurant, he describes as "a fight every day". "OK, so you know stuff like that is part of the business, and before I used to say they get upset but this is what they ask for." But now he's not so sure.
"There is a certain regulating that has to be done. And I'm starting to learn that I have to be a bigger participant in what happens." He worries most about what it is doing to his wife. He has even considered not doing print interviews again because, he says, of how they can distort what he says. (Hence the press woman at the back of the room.) After Boyz N The Hood it has taken nearly nine years for Cuba Gooding Jnr to once again find a leading screen role. Was this just luck of the draw or was this, too, something to do with being black?
"You have to think that some of it is the colour. Because it became a point where it wasn't about the work I had done or if I was capable of doing the role, but the casting was for white actors only and I ran up into a lot of that and I still run into it, because there are certain things they don't want to tackle. Certain issues.
"After Boyz N The Hood I got offered probably every black-scripted movie out there and then had to fight to get different types of roles. I didn't get the leads in other types of role, but I got roles that were different."
Nor were the rejections that easy to understand. For Rob Reiner's Oscar-winning A Few Good Men, in which he played a supporting role, Gooding originally auditioned for one of the lead characters on trial. "I had call back and call back and thought I was going to get the part and I was so excited and Rob Reiner was so gung ho. And right when they were starting to negotiate my contract my agent called and said, `I hate to tell you this, but they want you go back and audition just one more time.' And I said, `Why?' And my agent said, `Apparently the director just wants to talk to you.'
"I got ready to give my reading, but Rob just said, `Cuba, I hate to tell you but I rented Boyz N The Hood last night, and I hadn't seen it. Tell me, why did they use that shot with the kids walking on the railway track? And what about the dead body? That was straight out of Stand By Me.' "
Rob Reiner had, of course, directed Stand By Me, the now classic coming-of-age movie. And Cuba Gooding Jnr replays the scene, with Reiner jabbing his finger and accusing a shrugging young actor of plagiarism. He didn't get the part. "I was all shooken up and I was very upset. Now it's just funny to me. I had to say over and over how John Singleton directed that movie, not me. That was the most extreme example but it happens all the time. In interviews people say, `How could you say this in this movie?' and I say, `Well I signed on to do this movie, but they have me to bring emotion to it. I'll bring any emotion to it they want.'
"I've done takes on lines that make no sense at all but the director is trying to get a point across and he wants to me to deliver the line that way. It's my job to do it."
Getting the right role is still a problem. Since winning the Oscar he has done one film, Chill Factor, which he acknowledges was a supporting part although he had lead billing. In August he started shooting Navy Diver with Robert de Niro, about the life of Carl Bashir, a black amputee who reached the status of master diver in the US Navy. "So that's another lead, but that was a year and something away from Instinct, and that's a year and something away from the win. So it's a really hard struggle."
One that fell by the wayside was Blue Streak, directed by Andrew Davies. "Andrew is a wonderful director and he got into a fight with Columbia because they didn't want to cast me in the role. They gave it to Martin Lawrence because they felt he could carry the movie." Whatever else it does, Instinct proves that Cuba Gooding Jnr can "carry a movie" with the best of them, and that includes Hopkins. That Gooding more than holds his own is testament to his courage and ability. However, he is more circumspect. "The wariness mirrored what was going on." In many ways the role of the psychiatrist is as close to the real Cuba Gooding Jnr as we are ever likely to see on film: intelligent, emotionally restrained, sensitive and caring but hugely ambitious.
He would love to do theatre but sacked an agent who suggested he take two years out of film. "He was telling me there was nothing out there for me right now; take a couple of years in the theatre. So I was . . . why should I be with you then?"
Two years ago he produced A Murder Of Crows. Having failed to get studio backing, he managed to get it financed independently. Shown at Cannes in 1997, the movie failed, however, to get a good distribution deal in the US.
There's also a screenplay he wrote which he hopes to star in and possibly direct. But so far the studios aren't interested and he has no intention, he says, of producing again until he has sorted out domestic distribution. "I just don't want to bust a gut the hard way." And, for the first time in the interview, the furrows in his brow flatten out and he laughs.
Instinct goes on general release on Friday