Rhys Ifans talks to Joshua Rothkopf about flipping the script on the identity of William Shakespeare in Anonymous .

As the star of the new thriller by Hollywood’s Roland Emmerich – the demolition man behind Independence Day and 2012 – Rhys Ifans has some explaining to do. “We do set the theatre alight a couple of times,” the actor insists; Anonymous, a Shakespearean what-if drama that questions the playwright’s authorship, is unusually bereft of its director’s trademark explosions. Ifans, 44, is quick to defend Emmerich’s seriousness. “He can, of course, do the whole big CGI thing,” says Ifans, “but when he works with actors, there’s a loving, emotional attention to detail.” Pausing a moment, Ifans drops a bomb of his own: “Besides, the complete works of Shakespeare – whoever wrote them – are, in literary terms, the biggest explosion that’s happened to Western culture in the last 600 years.”

Anonymous does have a stick of dynamite at its core, especially if you happen to be a Shakespeare scholar. Besides being a zesty dramatisation of the goings-on of Elizabethan England, the movie makes the claim that William Shakespeare was no more than a highly paid beard – illiterate, no less! – for one Edward de Vere (Ifans), the educated 17th Earl of Oxford and incestuous lover of the Queen. Not new, this ‘Oxfordian’ theory continues to annoy the establishment, who can’t seem to kill it off. Now it’s being lent ammo by a big-budget film and a respected cast of stage veterans, including Derek Jacobi and two-time Tony-winner Mark Rylance, once the artistic director of London’s Globe.

“These actors are the experts – they speak the words of Shakespeare on a daily basis,” Ifans offers. “And if you assume that Edward was the author, it immediately politicises the historical plays, putting them in a different social context. Meanwhile, the romances become love letters to a queen. If that’s a way of revisiting or reinventing Shakespeare, it can only be a healthy thing.”

Ifans, perhaps best known for his roles in Notting Hill and Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg (he was the depressed British bandmate), seems to be enjoying the controversy, even if it’s only among the literati thus far. “Shakespeare is not an author to be read or studied,” the actor insists; “Shakespeare should be seen, spoken and heard. And that’s when it is at its most potent. There has to be a healthy modicum of disrespect in Shakespeare as well. If we can laugh at this movie, it allows us to own the works – more than an intimidating academic would like.”

Disrespect is something Ifans clearly relishes. He was the narrator of the 2010 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop – also, however loosely, about an anonymous artist, the provocateur Banksy. (The parallels aren’t lost on him: “We don’t know who Banksy is; that’s what gives him his power.”) Is Ifans drawn to the controversial? Ask him, and it’s more about telling truth to power. “Especially in those days, theatre was an arena in which ideas could be expressed to wider society,” he says. “It had the power that the internet does now, and would have posed the same threat to a totalitarian state as we’re seeing in the Middle East. That’s why these theatres were razed to the ground, because they were subversive and enlightening to a large populace.”

Ifans himself will be going broader with this summer’s The Amazing Spider-Man as the villainous Lizard. “What’s important to me is that I continue to be inspired by good writing, good ideas and good directors,” he says. “If you get bogged down in your profile, you become unnecessarily vain.” Spoken like a true Oxfordian.

Anonymous opens on Feb 2.