On January 24, Tom Sizemore decided to celebrate. The Relic, the schlock horror movie in which the 33-year-old actor stars, had removed Evita from the top of the American box office. Sizemore overdid it. “I never really drank before,” he says. “I’d always used narcotics until two years ago; not cocaine, the other one. I came home drunk and asked my wife for the cooking wine. She refused, so I said, ‘I’m going to the store.’ She said, ‘If you leave, I’m calling the police.’ I said, ‘Fuck you.’ So she hits 911 and I’m like, ‘Alright, you win,’ and she hung up. Minutes later, six police officers were at the door. They shouted ‘Step the fuck outside.’ I said, ‘Suck my fuckin’ dick, get on your fuckin’ horses …’ I started some cowboy motif that I never finished because they grabbed me. I was arrested but no charges were filed. It was embarrassing, and it won’t happen again.”

The Relic is the Detroit-born Sizemore’s first lead role, breaking a run of charismatically unhinged side-players that takes in Heat, Natural Born Killers and Strange Days. Tom Sizemore is a man who believes in preparation. While making Heat, he learned to strip and rebuild a rifle in two minutes. Before playing Natural Born Killer’s berserk cop Jack Scagnetti, he rode with the Chicago police. “I put on a bullet-proof jacked and said, ‘Take me to the most dangerous places.’ We went to murder scenes but I never got shot at. I was hoping I would, just to see what it felt like. I’m friendly with Dennis Fanning, the LA sergeant that Sean Penn based his Colors character on. Now I ride with Dennis for fun. He works in South Central.” Sizemore isn’t worried by the dangers of patrol. “I can,” he says, “kick most people’s asses.”

Despite Sizemore’s ass-kicking prowess, it was his portrayal of a laconic Chicago policeman in The Relic that secured him the Best Actor award at this year’s Madrid Film Festival – despite his having to play opposite a 15ft homicidal monster. “It might seem ridiculous, but acting’s ridiculous,” he says. “I’d done a series of movies with great parts but I wasn’t The Guy. I wanted to be in a big studio movie and I thought The Relic was a good horror movie that I could make better than if George Clooney was in it. Or somebody who stinks. Like Hugh Grant.”

Though he can laugh about some of his poorer movies, like Passenger 57 and Striking Distance, mention Harley Davidson And The Marlboro Man and Sizemore’s eyes bulge in an extremely unsettling way. “That was a piece of shit,” he says. “Mickey Rourke’s a fool. He’s a miserable motherfucker and he doesn’t really act. He just smokes cigarettes. Stephen Dorff’s the same. Acting cool. How the fuck can anything be cool in this century when you’ve had Mao, Stalin and Hitler killing 90 million fuckin’ people? And these guys are worried about their sunglasses and if the holes in their jeans aren’t in the right place. Stephen Dorff makes me nuts, but I don’t think he should be killed … I think he should be spanked.”