NEW YORK, NY.- On a morning in early February, actor Tobias Menzies walked the Brooklyn Heights Promenade in the relative anonymity he prefers. Menzies wasn’t hiding. He wore no sunglasses, no cap — just Blundstones, jeans, a shearling coat. He didn’t duck when people came his way. But the past few years, including multiseason stints on “The Crown” and “Outlander,” have brought him a new visibility, which still makes him uneasy.

“I’m not that confident about my life or what it is to be able to put it out in the public,” he said, shoulders hunched against the breeze. “I’m just bumbling along as best I can.”

Menzies, 49, had come to New York City to rehearse “The Hunt,” a theatrical adaptation of the Thomas Vinterberg movie that begins performances at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Friday. Back in 2019, Menzies had originated the stage role of Lucas, a preschool teacher falsely accused of exposing himself to a child, in a London production. A member of a local hunting club, Lucas now finds himself targeted by the community that once embraced him.

In the years since “The Hunt” premiered, Menzies has won an Emmy, for playing Prince Philip on the Netflix hit “The Crown,” and a fan base for his dual roles of Frank Randall and his sadistic ancestor Black Jack Randall on the Starz series “Outlander.” He also played somewhat against type as an anxious therapist in Nicole Holofcener’s acerbic comedy “You Hurt My Feelings.”

Five years ago, the role made perfect sense for Menzies, who specializes in wounded masculinity. The play, adapted by David Farr, is caustic and cerebral, and it reunited him with a frequent collaborator, director Rupert Goold. And Lucas is a type that Menzies has often gravitated toward: a man unable, whether by upbringing, temperament or circumstance, to show his feelings. Lucas benefits from both Menzies’ natural reserve and his ability to show what roils beneath that stoicism, a game of emotive hide-and-seek.

“I find less-is-more interesting to watch, characters that you have to lean toward and work out, because they don’t just reveal everything,” he said. “The world can be hard; it can be bruising,” he said. And those bruises don’t always show up in the obvious places.

Goold, speaking by telephone, recognized Menzies’ attraction to these seemingly reserved characters. “He does have an innate remoteness,” he said of his colleague. “That’s something he’s developed as he’s got older, a kind of distance. I don’t think he as a man is like that, but he does bring that for audiences.”

As a man, he is actually somewhat like that. He described himself as “naturally quite a private person,” and even a thorough online search discloses only the barest details of early life and actor training (elementary education at an alternative school, subsequent studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). “My instinct has always been to talk about the work and not myself,” he said. “Too much biography gets in the way.”

On the stroll, he manifested what an oversharing New Yorker might identify as typical British reserve. He does in fact have a personal life, even if he chooses not to talk about it. “The reason I don’t answer those questions is not that I don’t have any friends. Just to be clear,” he reassured me. He paused often, swallowing his words or letting the wind lift them away. Conversation flowed more easily walking side by side rather than speaking face to face. (That face has a courtly handsomeness, complicated by long vertical creases down each cheek. “They’re not ritual scars,” he said, “just an anomaly of how my face has grown.”) Entwined with that reserve is a fierce charisma and a mordant sense of humor. At one turn, his path was blocked by a large boulder, a hunk of sedimentary rock.

“Just to remind us where we’re all headed,” he said darkly. It was a gorgeous winter morning, but his thoughts were dust to dust.

Always a supporting player, at least on screen, he has suddenly become a leading man. Just as “The Hunt” wraps its run, AppleTV+ will release “Manhunt,” in which Menzies stars as Edwin Stanton, the U.S. secretary of war charged with capturing John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin. Which means that Menzies has gone from hunted to hunter and back. Is returning to the role of a man ostracized by his community, for reasons both false and true, the canniest career choice?

Probably not, but Menzies had committed to the transfer to St. Ann’s before the pandemic, and he would honor it. Besides, it’s the work that has always driven him, and not what that work might mean for his career, his profile. “I find that stuff very uncomfortable,” he said.

Recognizing that discomfort, it would be easy to assume that Menzies is a technical actor, an analytical one, someone who doesn’t let his own emotional life seep into a character. But for Menzies, acting is a deeply personal endeavor. If he is private in his public life, he is far more open onstage.

“I certainly use a lot of myself in my work,” he said. “That’s the quickest way to make it as real as possible. If you’re using memories of your own or experiences of your own, you’re right there. So, yeah, theater has always been quite personal for me.”

Asked what memories and experiences he had used for “The Hunt,” he became understandably warier. “Being outside, trying to get in,” he said, finally. Then, on the south end of the promenade, looking out toward the Statue of Liberty, he elaborated. “I guess on the spectrum, I’m probably something of an isolate; sometimes I can be that person. So that’s been relatively straightforward to access.”

Celebrity, of course, can provide its own isolation, particularly for those like Menzies who mistrust it. It’s uncomfortable to find yourself becoming this visible, this spotlit. And that seems to have enhanced this version of “The Hunt.” “In dealing with celebrity and the way that can be toxic or even ostracizing at times,” his performance “is even richer now,” Goold said. “To be an outsider in a more profound way is what I perceive Tobias’ work is now.”

After “The Hunt,” Menzies will finishing shooting a Formula 1 movie, opposite Brad Pitt and Javier Bardem, delayed by the writers’ and actors’ strikes. And if that sounds fairly commercial and maybe even fun (“Essentially, it’s the action film,” he said, “these pirouettes of character, and then it’s more driving”), he will follow it up with a new production of the Greek tragedy “Antigone” at the National Theater, in London.

“I’m not the most strategic of actors, clearly,” he admitted. He’d made a loop of the promenade and was heading down the slope back toward St. Ann’s. “I very much orient to if the work good enough, it will lead me to where I need to be.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.