By Keeley Bolger

This isn't the John Goodman I'm expecting. Warm and polite, he greets me with an apology for starting the interview late, as he was having a cigarette.

He needn't have worried - we're talking a couple of minutes tops - but his apology has thrown me nonetheless.

A few years ago, when the 63-year-old was in the UK promoting Inside Llewyn Davis, a film all the richer for his brief performance in it, he was terse, irritable and monosyllabic.

Admittedly, a day on the publicity carousel, being filmed while chatting to 40 journalists one after the other in five-minute blasts, does sound pretty draining, but with others telling similar tales of his brusqueness, I had written the actor off as rude.

Three years on, the cameras are off, there's no entourage and Goodman seems altogether friendlier and calmer, welcoming me into his room with polite chit-chat and a cup of tea. We're not quite in open-armed Dan Conner from Roseanne territory, but the atmosphere is genial.

But while he's known for scene-stealing, larger than life characters in movies like The Big Lebowski, Raising Arizona and The Artist, in person, Walter, Gale and Al he ain't.

"I'm shy, and I have a problem with it," Goodman admits.

Fame, adoration and recognition are topics that see him clam up (though he remains good company), and he says he's "dealing with it better than I used to".

For instance, these days, if he's stopped and asked for a photo - and he's "done", "not comfortable", or there's too many people around - "I'll just say, 'No, thank you', and walk away".

"That took a lot, because I still want to please everyone," confesses the star, who is married with one grown-up daughter.

He's been on the other side of the fence, too.

"When I saw somebody I admired [Kristen Wiig] at the Saturday Night Live reunion, I thought I knew her, but we'd never met," he says with a smile.

"So I walked up to her and she's in the middle of a conversation, and I just left and thought, 'You're the rudest person that ever lived, you don't know this woman'."

As a child growing up in St Louis, Missouri, Goodman was inspired by Spartacus and Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, but didn't seriously consider acting until a sporting injury put his dreams of playing professional football on ice.

Moving to New York in the mid-Seventies, he made headway with roles in adverts, taking on bar work to pay the bills too, before that plum role in Roseanne gave him greater prominence.

He's still proud of his time in the seminal sitcom (though he says a reunion is unlikely), but these days is just as likely to be recognised for his roles in Barton Fink, Monsters, Inc. or Argo.

Despite his lengthy career, he is not jaded. In fact, he experienced a career high last year, when he left Hollywood to make his West End debut in David Mamet's American Buffalo, alongside Damian Lewis and Tom Sturridge.

He and his wife Anna Beth were so sad to leave the UK afterwards that he says she "wept" in the taxi to the airport. While he would return for stage work "in a minute", Goodman confides he is "worried" about it living up to last year's experience.

"I think I'm trying to catch lightning in a bottle twice," says the actor, who is looking slimmer after battling alcohol addiction in the past. "I just loved it so much. I had the best time, it was very satisfying."

Though there are no current plans to return to the stage, he's back on comfortable ground in his latest film, Trumbo. Starring Bryan Cranston - who has scored an Oscar nomination for his performance - the biographical drama tells the story of acclaimed screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Cranston), whose career came to a halt in the late 1940s when he and other figures - the so-called 'Hollywood 10' - were blacklisted for their political beliefs.

Trumbo, who penned Roman Holiday and The Brave One, battles with the US government and studio bosses over creative freedom and also comes up against scathing gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren).

If there is an unexpected hero of the piece, it's Goodman's character, the heavy-handed Frank King, who, along with his brother, works as a Hollywood producer.

When no one else will hire Trumbo or his cohorts, the Kings (who are seen using brute force to get their way) proved to be a much needed lifeline, even if the scripts they were producing under pseudonyms weren't creatively fulfilling.

"People ask me if I based it on Harvey Weinstein," he says with a smile. "But, no. I don't know Harvey that well and I don't think he behaves like that."

Too young to have been personally affected by the blacklisting, Goodman nevertheless appreciates the pressure others were under at the time, and feels "extremely grateful" to be working now.

"I came into the business in 1975, which is only 12 or 15 years after a lot of this died down," he says.

"People were badly hurt, careers, lives destroyed. I like to look back on it and think, 'Oh what a silly era', but it can happen again. I'd like to think I'd behave bravely and boldly but I can't judge anybody from that era, because the whole thing was so flawed. Nobody won."

Besides, the studio system is not one he thinks he could have thrived under.

"They assign you your films and you have no leeway or say in it - you're controlled by the publicity machine," says Goodman.

"I don't think I would have done very well that way. They toss you when they're finished with you. I think things are, or at least the way I operate, better for me now."

Trumbo is out now