TORONTO--Director Atom Egoyan excitedly cues up a scene from his newest movie, "Felicia's Journey." In the scene, Bob Hoskins is staring across a pub at the man who impregnated and then abandoned the young girl with whom Hoskins is standing at the bar. The girl (Elaine Cassidy), who's come from Ireland to England in search of the father, doesn't see him, but Hoskins does.

"Look at his ears," Egoyan says of Hoskins. "His agent called and asked me what I had done to his ears."

Unbelievably, without the aid of prosthetics or digital sleight-of-hand, Hoskins' ears are pointed--not like Mr. Spock but like the devil. In "Felicia's Journey," adapted from the novel by William Trevor, Hoskins plays the devil--a a man with a sinister secret--with a smiling face and an easy manner.

"You've got to play two roles at once," says Hoskins, 57, who is sitting with his legs tucked underneath him in a Toronto hotel room. He's a fireplug of a man with a gray-tinged dome and wearing stretchy sweats rather than the carefully assembled package favored by actors--or their publicists--when doing press.

"Physically I played the nicest man in the world," he continues. "Inside is Hannibal Lecter." 

This is a different part for Hoskins, who, though he's played a variety of characters over the years (including J. Edgar Hoover in "Nixon"), is best known for his surly but sympathetic tough guys in such films as "The Long Good Friday," "Mona Lisa," even "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." Though he insists that he hasn't been typecast by these roles, he theorizes that Egoyan was not unaware of them when he cast him as Hilditch, the mother-obsessed catering manager.

"Quite a lot of actors could have played the part, but I think why he cast me was because, like all actors who have put in a bit of time, I bring some baggage," Hoskins says. "The baggage I bring is potential violence. There's been a lot of violence in my career. Although I'm playing Hilditch, I'm still Bob Hoskins and there is still a chance that someone is going to end up on a meat hook."

Egoyan, however, says he was thinking less of the "Bob Hoskins character, a kind of garrulous Cockney" than he was of a role Hoskins played much earlier in his career--Iago, in a Jonathan Miller production of "Othello" for the BBC.

"I'll never forget that performance, because of all those monologues laying out his plans that were done to the camera," Egoyan says. "His lying was so effortless. There was nothing conniving about it. There was nothing particularly dark or menacing. It was just very friendly. So when I was working on the adaptation, I had in mind Bob as Iago." 

Hoskins accepted the role despite the fact that he found both the Trevor book and Egoyan's most recent film, "The Sweet Hereafter," depressing. Compounding his uneasiness was the fact that he has two daughters of his own, ages 26 and 16.

"Let's face it, Hilditch is every parent's nightmare," he says. Then he adds, in a burst of candor, "The worst thing is finding out that it's in you. This could have been me."

But, of course, it is not him, not even for the length of the shoot.

"You can imagine if I had taken the sort of characters I play home to Linda and the kids, my bags would be out on the steps," he says. "I'm not one of those Method [actors]--I haven't got a lot of time for it, actually. It did reach a point where I had to go away and bleed a while, just bleed it out. I was pretty strained, even though I carried on as normal, to realize the fact that I am strange."

"It's a stunning performance," Egoyan says. "It's so subtle and so detailed, and it's not showy at all. How Hilditch experiences himself is as a very controlled, nice man who cares for people, who helps people. We are never made to feel that what he's doing is fascinating or brilliant or that he is pure evil. It's understated, and that's how Hilditch would prefer to see himself, as someone who goes about his day. I worry that people won't appreciate how great a performance it is."

Hoskins doesn't seem to be worrying about how the performance is perceived. He'll gladly talk about the nuances of the character and how he arrived at them, or about the pleasure of working with Egoyan, but he really warms up when discussing some of the people he's worked with over the years, among them Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone and Dennis Potter. It turns out that he's something of a storyteller and practical joker.

When Hoskins was doing "Nixon" for Stone, for example, he and actor Brian Bedford convinced the director that their characters should wear pink tutus. On "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," Hoskins' burly stand-in/chauffeur/"amanuensis," Sammy, took executive producer Spielberg's parking space and terrorized his office at Amblin. Then there was the time Hoskins starred in the late Dennis Potter's brilliant "Pennies From Heaven" for the BBC.

"The director wanted a scene played full frontal--about as sexy as a bag of Brussels sprouts," Hoskins says, his face starting to redden, his breath beginning to wheeze. "The BBC went bananas: 'Listen, we cannot show Hoskins' [penis] on the television! We will get letters of complaint!' And Potter goes, 'No, no, you show Hoskins' [penis] on the television, you will get letters of sympathy, I promise you.' " Here Hoskins explodes with laughter. Then he continues, still imitating Potter: " 'The only problem is full frontal. Let's have a profile, let's go halfway.' He convinced them! And I got a profile. First on the television!"

Egoyan excepted, Hoskins hasn't been working with this kind of high-profile talent of late, though he's been in half a dozen films since "Felicia's Journey" wrapped, playing such disparate characters as Manuel Noriega, Sancho Panza and Mr. Micawber.

He admits that there isn't a lot of money in parts like these but says, "The money is in the bank. I've built the house. I've paid for my kids' education. My old lady can dress as she wants. I don't want to say I won't go back to Hollywood. If that fee is big enough, I'll be there."

Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times