#kate kellaway

I spent the morning before meeting him with a DVD of The Motorcycle Diaries. I watched Gael's young Che Guevara travel from Buenos Aries to Venezuela (7,800 miles) and repeatedly fall off a Norton motorbike into the dust. I observed him waiting at the edges of rooms until girls invited him to dance and he - ineptly - complied. In the film, he is self-contained, elsewhere. He is warm and aloof at the same time. His hair is short and smooth. It's the 1950s. His gaze is steady. His eyes are indeterminately green. Shyness, reserve and non-participation are part of the draw.

But in the Almeida's upstairs office, 26-year-old Gael does not qualify as wallflower material (he is a demon dancer, salsa a speciality). He bobs into the room: open, sweet, puppyish. Disarmingly, he kisses me on the cheek, sits down, plucks off the hat and lays it neatly on the table in front of him. He has long, unruly dark hair, a hippyish T-shirt and lumpy, scuffed black shoes. He sits down and looks at me with that gaze, applying himself to my questions with a concentration they cannot deserve. It is the same quality of attention he brings to his work. I say I've been watching him come off his bike all morning - did he get hurt? 'In some cases, yeah.' Serious acting? 'Serious reacting,' he jokes.

Gael's English is ambitious. When he can't find the right word, he swears but does not give up, garlanding his sentences with alternatives. He loves Lorca. He believes Lorca has the power to make English audiences thaw, to become aware of the emotions we have mislaid, passions we will now be able to name. 'The passions of people in this country, they are not aware of until they discover Lorca,' he maintains. And for himself: 'Lorca can be related to everything in my life.'

Gael plays Lorenzo, who is more an emotion than a character, driven by a sexual obsession that will - when he steals away with his former sweetheart on her wedding day to another man - prove fatal. Gael identifies with this: 'Passion is inflammable, it can spark out into impetuous actions that lead to disaster in most cases.' He adds a puzzling postscript: 'Unfortunately, I am born in a time and place and context in which I don't even allow myself to put the kettle on. I just let things happen.' I try to get him to elucidate (how does he make a cup of coffee?) in vain. My translation: his love life is out of his control (the kettle's metaphorical).

He is clearer on the subject of theatre itself, expressing gratitude at being on stage because 'theatre is present tense'. But he is scared: 'I ask myself: am I going to have that complexity? That intensity?' He is learning to trust the language, let it work for him. Acting, he finds, helps with whatever he is feeling in his own life. 'If I am in distress or in a crisis, I can surf that pain [he is a keen surfer and footballer]. As an actor, you exercise emotions, you play with them as a guitarist might use his fingers. It's a workout.'

Gael seems so ready to wear his heart on his sleeve that I ask him what it is like being described as a romantic idol ('doe-eyed soulfulness' … 'superbly handsome and charismatic') and gossiped about as Natalie Portman's ex-boyfriend, or speculated over as a potential partner for Keira Knightley. He smiles. Please tell me honestly, I say. 'Very honestly, it is hard for me to see an outside perspective on myself. It is hard - and I don't share it. I wake up every day, look at myself in the mirror and I am the same person who looked into the mirror every morning when I was scared shitless of going to school. But I suppose there must be a map of time passing somewhere.'

Gael's 'map of time' started in Guadalajara, where he was born. His father Jose Angel Garcia and his mother Patricia Bernal were actors and he grew up in an intellectual, left-wing household. Aged three, he played Jesus (starting at the top) in the middle of a lake. As a teenager, he moved to Mexico City and starred in local soap operas. In 1997, he trained at London's Central School (he has described London as 'staid and lonely') before getting a breakthrough role in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros (Love's a Bitch). When last in London, he used to work in Cuba Libre, down the road from the Almeida, mixing cocktails. He modelled for a boutique in Hoxton. He worked on building sites. Has London improved? 'London leads to introspection. People go home every night to think, sleep and clean.' In Mexico City, he could be '20 different people leading 20 social lives'. In London, when he rings a friend and asks: 'Would you like to do something?', he has learnt to expect the reply: 'No, I am just chilling out…' He likes London's introspection, he says. He has such nice manners. But his ambition is to keep working in Mexico and Latin America and to travel. He loves 'the crazy feeling that your house is becoming bigger'. And travel preserves his freedom: 'I want to go on feeling incredibly innocent.'

Not that he is innocent, really. There is no mistaking his political conscience. Before he became an actor, he taught literacy to the Huicholes Indians. Later, he took part in the peaceful uprising of the state of Chiapas in support of Marcos Zapatista's rebels. And he did not think twice about speaking out at the Oscars, against the Iraq war. He has only made one Hollywood film so far: The King, with Daryl Hannah [this is an odd mistake for Kellaway to make, because Laura Harring replaced Hannah before filming started; also, it wasn't technically a 'Hollywood' film, although that error's more understandable]. It is easy to see why he might prefer work in Venezuela or Islington.

Five minutes left. I ask about the hat. 'It means so much to me. It was a gift from a woman in Peru when I was making Motorcycle Diaries. It has been with me for a while. We were staying in the houses of poor people who would give us everything they had.' Last question: His dream part? 'Harry Potter. I'd love to fly.' 'The Broomstick Diaries?' He laughs and says goodbye.

Exit Gael. Enter Rufus Norris, who tells me about travelling to Mexico with his wife hoping to hire Gael for Blood Wedding. Rufus predicted it would take 'at least a couple of days.' But as soon as they met, Gael said: 'I've said yes - d'you want a beer?' Rufus describes Gael as 'completely unpretentious. He remains a Mexican by which I mean he appears not to have a dollar sign tattooed on his bottom.' As an actor, what Rufus most values is that Gael is 'so open. He can be very masculine but there is a vulnerability there too, he has complete access to it.' (In Almodovar's Bad Education, he dazzled as a transvestite). But he knows Gael is a gamble: 'I have never seen him on stage so it might not work.'

Being conscious of what 'might not work' is Rufus Norris's thing. It is 'almost a rule' to take on work that frightens him: 'I need to be very scared.' He has been feted everywhere, winning the Evening Standard's Outstanding Newcomer theatre award in 2001, but at 40, he is no longer the new kid on the block. He is 'expected to deliver'. As a director, he is fastidious, a class act. Festen (shortly to transfer to Broadway) ran with Rolls Royce smoothness. But Blood Wedding is more of a horse-drawn vehicle - driven by poetry and symbolism.

What the plays have in common is extreme emotion. I wonder if it is difficult getting actors to go to the edge? 'Actors are always happy to go to extremes but for the audience that is not very interesting. What is more interesting is seeing the spark that causes the emotion.' A person in 'the extreme throes of passion' is often 'unbelievable' to an audience. He nips round the table and pulls up a chair a foot away from me. He instructs me to tell him to 'Fuck off'. I do as he asks, looking him in the eye. Then he tells me to act the emotion without words. I swivel round, turning away from him. An actions-speak-louder-than-words lesson. It gives me an inkling of what it might be like to be directed by him: fun - but not plain sailing.

Rufus loves working with his international cast (Icelandic, Irish, Dutch, Portuguese, Madagascan) and with his wife, Tanya Ronder, who has written a new adaptation of the play. 'She was an actress for years, she acted in Bernarda Alba, so has experience of what it is like to have those words in the mouth.' He is anxious not to be too tripped by cliche. Playwrights, he says, come with associations: Chekhov: 'Samovar, pale, depressed people in long coats, high ceilings. Ibsen: 'Similar - though coats are shorter, the people less suicidal and instead of a samovar, there is a fjord.' But with Lorca, all you get are peasants and heat. The lawyer for the Lorca estate told him: 'I've got one rule. Please… no castanets.'