Kurt Russell landed his first movie part in the Elvis Presley movie It Happened At The World's Fair (1963) at the age of ten, before playing baseball for the most part of the 70s. He later played the rock 'n' roll legend in John Carpenter's TV movie Elvis Presley (1979), as well as an Elvis impersonator in 3,000 Miles To Graceland (2001). But he has made his biggest splash in films such as Escape From New York (1981), The Thing (1982), Silkwood (1983), Backdraft (1991) and Tombstone (1993). His career was nearly sunk by box office disasters Escape From LA (1996) and Soldier (1998) but he recovered to appear in critically acclaimed efforts such as Dark Blue (2002) and Sky High (2005). The actor now finds himself playing a father attempting to save his daughter in disaster remake, Poseidon, and here talks about some of the challenges involved...

What was it that appealed to you about this role?

Wolfgang Petersen was the reason I did this movie. I wanted to work with the man who directed Das Boot. I thought that movie had an incredible intensity and urgency to it. Then, once I was on the set, I found a wonderful group of people who were all trying to pull Wolfgang's vision together and put it on the screen.

Did it ever strike you ironic that you were playing a former fireman, given your previous role in Backdraft?

[Laughs] It's funny because there's a fine line between ego and stupidity. That is to say, if you're an actor with a huge ego you might say: "Did everybody in the world see Backdraft and then think I'm an asshole for playing another fireman? Or did nobody see that movie and I'm fine?" Some people pick it up, much like Richard Dreyfuss and I did on set. In Richard's case, we got to the end of the movie and he said: "Is it just me, or didn't everyone see Jaws? This thing that he's going to throw up there is a canister that we blew up a shark with one time. Does it look like we're doing that again?" But nobody else has mentioned that. The truth of the matter is, yes, I did say: "Excuse me, I don't want to look like an idiot here..." But you know what? This is just a guy who was a fireman once.

What did you try and bring to the role that might be different?

Well the way we looked at it, he probably was a very good fireman and it was a career that took him all the way to being the Mayor of New York, which he should never have become. That was his big disaster. Because of that, he lost his wife and he lost his connection with his daughter. He therefore became a very guilty man who became very over-protective of his daughter and who decided to take her on a cruise to try and straighten things out. But a funny thing happened on the way to Hawaii, or wherever we were going...

You did a lot of your own stunts on this film. How risky was that?

Well, up until Backdraft there wasn't a lot of this. I know that because Ron Howard and I talked about it a lot and we had to go and find actors that were willing to set themselves on fire using a gel that had only just been invented. After that movie, more and more directors started wanting to put actors into scenes. But there's something that's very real that goes along with actors doing their own stunts. If one of those actors goes down for any reason, that's a lot of money. So you have to be very, very, very careful. And the stunt people then become extremely important in terms of how they set up something with the actors and the director so that you can do this and get away with it. For instance, it only takes one cable to break when Emmy [Rossum]'s 75ft above the ground and she's dead and so is the movie. It's not taken lightly. So on these movies that cost so much and which involve tremendous commitment from the studio, you've got to stay healthy.

A UK cinema chain ran a poll a couple of years ago that named the original Poseidon Adventure as the top disaster film of all time. How do you think this remake will be regarded in 30 years?

That's a good question because I think it has a lot to say about our industry. In all honesty, people will have their own opinion but they are two different movies. One is a sort of camp classic and the other one is about non-stop suspense. What will be interesting to look at is the way the characters are presented in this movie versus the original. That's actually an interesting question about how movies are made today versus how they were made 33 years ago.

Poseidon is released in UK cinemas on Thursday 1st June 2006.