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In Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, which recently arrived on Broadway following a four-month stint at London's National Theatre, Ciarán Hinds plays none other than the devil himself. But at the moment, the actor is sitting in a packed Times Square café, sipping multiple glasses of happy hour pinot noir. With an eight-o'clock shadow, a world-worn North Face backpack, and his plaid shirt unbuttoned a tad lower than might be expected, Hinds (whose first name is pronounced KEER-in) looks—and sounds—anything but fiendish. "There's gotta be something that's cold, or a malignancy," he admits, his debonair if slightly rumpled countenance belying an inviting brogue. "At the same time, they have to say, 'Oh, I like the devil.' "

It's obvious that the 54-year-old Belfast native's congenital benevolence makes, rather than breaks, his character. The arsenal Hinds exhibits in conversation—near-fluent French, a passable Texas twang, Samuel Beckett quotes—is more old-country charm than war game, and it reveals the range that enabled him to grow from peripatetic board-treader to BBC star to Hollywood chameleon. Since his last Broadway turn in 1999 (in Patrick Marber's Closer), Hinds has worked with everyone from Steven Spielberg on Munich to Michael Mann on Miami Vice while conquering America as Julius Caesar in HBO's Rome. For the American run of The Seafarer—an update of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, in which the modern demon has a taste for moonshine and prefers poker to chess—McPherson, the wunderkind Irish writer and director, made Hinds his top choice. "With Ciarán, you've got a lot of different weapons with which to attack the audience," McPherson says. "He's got a weapon to seduce them and a weapon to bash them over the head and terrify them."

With two marquee movies this season, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (based on the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!) and Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding, Hinds's hold on the public eye is more secure than ever. As an egoistic Long Island writer in Margot, he even gets the upper hand on some boldface names. "It was an honor," Hinds says, the very image of the gracious thespian, "to kick the shit out of Jack Black and then reduce Nicole Kidman to tears."

So what will a dashing, successful actor spending six months away from his Parisian household—which includes his partner of 20 years, actress Hélène Patarot, and their 16-year-old daughter, Aoife—get up to? "Nothing too taxing. A good book and a Granny Smith," he says. "And sex clubs and S & M. The usual." Not on that list is a move to L.A., or a clichéd attempt at directing. Having made good use of his bootstraps in the past, Hinds refuses to get ahead of himself now. He knows full well how disposable actors can be in this business as well as the sting of the dismissive epithet talking prop. "Some actors take that as an insult," he says. "I think it's very amusing myself." With things going this well for Hinds, even when he's hypothesizing the potential demise of his career, devilish good humor comes easily.