Will Kemp has, according to whom you believe, blond hair or brown hair.  He has blue eyes or green eyes, but sometimes they are brown.  He is, according to most people (women) and his endless (gay-oriented websites) the "Tom Cruise of the dance world".  And he is also, when he walks into a bar near the Royal Opera House, not particularly recognisable as the man who has danced his way into women's hearts in the new Gap TV advert.

He's the one in the denim shirt and jeans who leaps about in a rather cool fashion.  Office girls have his picture, usually labelled Hunk of the Month, stuck to their consoles.

"Oh, um, yes, um..." says Kemp, who is bashful about the Gap hooha - and actually has brown hair and green eyes.  "Well, no one, neither me nor Gap, expected the advert to be so successful.  I went along and messed about for a couple of hours, and I was pleased with the result because it all seems very laid-back.  And Gap has put on sales because of it, so I'm pleased."

But 25-year-old Kemp is wary of this new-found fame.  "I've had so many job offers since," he says. 

"I've turned them down.  I'm a dancer and an actor and to do that convincingly you have to stay unrecognisable.  If I was the face of, whatever, I'd lose my appeal."  He probably wouldn't.  But, then again, Kemp takes his work seriously.

"I've been a dancer for seven and a half years," he says.  "I spent two years training at the Royal Ballet, which is like being in the Army and didn't suit me because it was so rigid and technical." 

When he came of out the senior school, aged 17, he joined Matthew Bourne's Adventures in Motion Pictures.  He first came to prominence in 1995 with the company's now notorious Swan Lake.  "I was playing a swan and then I took on the role of the Prince."

Bourne's Swan Lake broke ballet taboos - all the swans were male.  "It was very tongue-in-cheek," says Kemp. He went on to star in Car Man (based on Bizet's Carmen) and then a play/ballet at the National called Play Without Words.  But although Kemp lives in north London with his long-term fiancee, whom he refuses to name but says is a composer, his ambitions lie in the States.

"Swan Lake was very successful there and Car Man was doing well but halfway through the tour
11 September  happened and the powers that be decided that a ballet-cum-opera-cum-theatre involving violence was not what America needed, so the tour was cancelled."

This left him footloose in Los Angeles and so he did something he had always wanted to do - he called up some casting agents.  He ended up getting a part in a Renny Harlin film called Mindhunters, which is out next year, starring Christian Slater and Val Kilmer.

"I didn't expect to get anything, but is was fun."  However, he adds:  "My heart is in dancing."

There is only a trace left of the nervous, diffident boy with a terrible stammer who started dancing aged nine at the Rudolf Steiner school in Hertfordshire, an alternative school where there were no exams.  "I was athletic but not academic," he says.  "My brother was very sporty but I didn't have anything I was really good at, so my mother suggested I dance."  The school didn't like it.

"Steiner is all about eurythmics - that is, dancing from within - and they didn't like the showiness of ballet.  But I think I helped them see that ballet is not threatening.  It is beautiful."   Quite amazingly, he wasn't bullied.  "I think people liked what I did," he says.  He admits he used dance to avoid other issues:  he says he was aimless, and unsure of his looks.

Now he feels more confident.  He still has a slight stammer but that doesn't seem to be halting his advance in the film world.  "I'm working on it," he says.

He remains focused: "My family would tell me pretty quickly if I was getting too big for my boots."

His parents (a housewife and a graphic designer) find his newfound fame "hilarious" and have supported his decision to turn down the lucrative modelling contracts.  "I haven't gone through all this hard work just to become a model," he says.  "Armani offered me a great job and a lot of money and I was really tempted.  I could have put a payment down on a bigger house, but in the end I decided it wasn't for me."  Instead, he is currently rehearsing at the Royal Opera House.  He is to be Ratty in their new Christmas version of Wind in the Willows.

"It's odd to be back there," he says.  "It's funny how life goes round.  I'm now working with lots of old friends and being paid virtually nothing - but I love it," he says, stretching his arches and taking off his socks.  He has dancer's feet - callouses, blisters and red weals.  It's good to know that even Will Kemp isn't perfect.

*Wind in the Willows*, at the Royal Opera House, runs from 10-22December, 020 7304 4000.
Will Kemp's Gap ad makes women swoon, but there's one bit of his body he'll never show in public.
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Will Kemp:  Turned down an Armani contract to play Ratty in the Wind in the Willows