Those are complex strands of feeling and characterization for any actor to manage, particularly when he has no idea what the movie he's starring in is about: Wong generally doesn't give his actors scripts, instead shaping the story and characters as he goes along. And "2046" -- which is partly a story of restlessness and desire in mid-'60s Hong Kong and Singapore, and partly a deeply touching futuristic dream romance between androids and humans -- is an adamantly nonlinear, challenging picture. But Leung's performance is seamless and confident -- so much so that when I met with him briefly in New York last spring, to talk about "2046," I wasn't prepared to speak with an actor who appeared to be completely lacking in guile, to the extent that he didn't know (or, perhaps more accurately, didn't care) how to play the movie-star/interviewer game.

In other words, I expected to talk to a movie star, and a person showed up instead: It threw me totally. I don't just mean that Leung showed up in casual, comfortable clothes (which he did), or that he -- how do the people who talk to movie stars all the time usually put it? -- "picked at the salad in front of him as he considered my question" (which he didn't -- there were no salads, although he did consider my questions). We had two 15-minute conversations, split by a surprisingly brief interlude in which the publicist whisked him off to be photographed by the New York Times. (He returned to me, claiming to have told the photographer that he hadn't yet finished our interview, even though I'd been promised only 15 minutes anyway.) In person, Leung is so direct that he sometimes gives the impression of betraying intimate confidences even when he isn't; and, particularly at first, his face is so impassive that you can't read anything off it except ingrained politeness. (Most actors will give you something to read immediately, maybe partly to throw you off the trail of who they really are and what they're really thinking, but probably mostly to smooth the way for the interview ahead: They're playing a role, so are you, and it's best just to jump in and get on with things.) It seems at first that Leung simply saves everything for the camera. That's not a bad strategy as far as acting goes, but anxiety-provoking for anyone whose job it is to put him at ease -- in this case, me.

But the more I listened to Leung, the more I suspected that this soft-spoken, pensive guy recognizes the difference between being a movie idol in his own mind, and in his heart. He told me things he has told numerous other interviewers who, in their allotted 15 minutes, asked precisely the same questions that I did, which is only fair: The same questions deserve nothing more than the same answers. At one point, he explained to me why he loves acting as much as he does -- largely because "you can hide behind someone and express your feelings; you can cry in front of others without being shy." Then he looked at me squarely and said, without even a hint of self-consciousness, "I'm a very shy person with very low self-esteem" -- not as if he were confiding anything particularly personal, but as if he were stating an irrefutable fact. I've since found other interviews in which Leung has said almost the exact same thing, which I see not as an exhausted response to the same old questions but as an insistence on his part to convince people that it's true.

Leung trusts Wong Kar Wai implicitly, he says, and not just because he has been working with him for 15 years. "I love his way of making movies," Leung says, "and we've known each other for quite some time, staring with 'Days of Being Wild.' We've built a lot of trust in each other, and that's the most important thing." He also acknowledges that his working relationship with Wong is different from the one he forges with other directors. "We are very strange. We seldom talk on the set. We don't see each other, besides work. And he never tells me anything about his personal life -- although I tell him a lot about mine," Leung says with a glimmer of mischievousness. "I think he needs to know, if he's going to shoot me. But he never tells me anything about himself. So for me, he's quite a mysterious person. But as working partners, we are quite happy working together."

Even so, Leung has no reservations about the difficulties and frustrations of working with Wong. He recalls showing up on the set the first day and having Wong tell him that he wanted him to play the same character he played in "In the Mood for Love," but in a different way: "Like a new man, a new character, but with the same name and same identity, but like somebody else."

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