The timing couldn’t have been eerier, Colin Firth recalls.

It was Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, and Firth was filming a scene for Tom Ford’s film, “A Single Man,” in which his character, a gay college professor in 1962, has a phone conversation about his late lover’s death in a car accident. The lover’s family, he is told, will not allow him at the funeral because they refuse to acknowledge that the dead man was, in fact, gay.

“And that was the day that Proposition 8 passed in California,” Firth says, sitting in a lobby bar of Manhattan’s Carlyle Hotel. “And I thought, ‘Maybe we are still in 1962.’”

 “A Single Man,” which opens in limited release today (12.11.2009), is a film about a man who decides to live one last day and then end his life. But the question of gay rights – in this case, gay marriage – is inevitably a subtext of the tale of a man bereft at the death of his lover and unable to mourn publicly.

“When Proposition 8 passed, I thought, ‘If that can happen now, if something so retrograde can occur in 2008, maybe we haven’t made much progress at all,” Firth, 49, says. “To me, it was this triumphant day – when America made a very progressive change – and it had this bitter twist. I’m playing a man who is gay and being denied basic human rights in 1962, when a law is being passed to deny the same rights today.

“It’s not just homosexuality. I think all sexuality scares people. If a nation can go berserk over Janet Jackson’s nipple, then all is not well – and not just in this country. You travel across the Middle East, where people are thrashed, stoned, tortured, executed. All of these sexual taboos: Really, it’s all fear of ourselves. I don’t think anyone who has a healthy sense of their own sexuality is going to be discriminating against others based on theirs. It’s jumping at shadows, isn’t it?”

The British-born Firth is a busy actor, one who is bemused at his own sex-symbol status among a certain strata of women (who are fans of his Mr. Darcy in a 1995 miniseries of “Pride and Prejudice”). In the past few years, he’s played everything from the painter Johannes Vermeer (“The Girl with the Pearl Earring”) to a singing suitor to Meryl Streep (“Mamma Mia”) to a modern reprise of Mr. Darcy (“Bridget Jones’ Diary”).

“I started acting because I wasn’t enjoying school and doors were closing rapidly,” he says. “My family is full of doctors and teachers. I had an uncle who was a very inspiring pediatrician and I thought about that. But to enter that field, I’d have had to be good at chemistry, biology, things like that. And it was obvious I wasn’t going to shine.

“As a kid, we were uprooted a lot and kids tend to have a survival mechanism. I developed that with fantasy books, literature, story-telling, history – any form of narrative. That’s when I was happiest.”

Firth is considered a serious Oscar contender for his performance in Ford’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel. He’s been nominated for an IFP Spirit award and will be in the hunt for year-end critics’ prizes. He credits Ford, a fashion guru making his directorial debut.

“He’s one of the most brilliant directors I’ve ever worked with because he directed by inspiration, rather than instruction,” Firth says. “He’s very economical in the way he imparts his vision. He’s very articulate but he’s not a verbose man. It was the set and the costumes, as much as anything, that told me where I was going.”

As Ford worked, he trusted the actors and his crew to capture what he wanted: “There was not a frenzy of coverage,” Firth says. “He didn’t try a thousand different lenses. He trusted the actors to give him what he needed – and so we all felt a tremendous sense of freedom.”

A visual artist working in film for the first time, Ford makes a couple of stylistic leaps – the most obvious being his use of color. As George goes through his day – and recognizes things of beauty that he’ll be seeing for the last time – the muted  scheme of the film suddenly is infused with a rush of intense color, if only for a moment.

“It reminds me of interviews I saw with (writer) Dennis Potter as he was dying,” Firth says. “He talked about looking out the window and seeing blossoms. He’s seen them before. But he knew these were the last he would get to see. And they were brighter and more vibrant than any he’d seen before. All the epiphanies that George goes through during this day are really everyday things. It’s not God speaking through a burning bush.”

Firth says he learned a great deal about the character from the clothes he chooses for his last day on Earth.

“I knew that George was dressing this way because he was hanging on by his fingernails – and this was his body armor,” Firth says. “Paradoxically, when he’s dressed that way, he has the feeling of being in complete control, although he’s not.”

It was the sense of being two people – or of being someone who worked hard at hiding his true nature from the world – that Firth enjoyed most in creating the character. His performance is a masterpiece of nuance, in which the roiling emotions within rarely come out, except through Firth’s eyes.

“I could write down a list of human emotions that he’s going through and go on for a long time – and they’d all apply,” he says. “What interested me is that he has to put up a wall to face the world. What interested me is what permeates that wall, what goes in and out. He’s trying to protect himself against the world and stop the world from seeing what’s going on inside. But things do get in – and things slip out. Without the wall, those things would not be of interest.”

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