Topher Grace confesses to nostalgia for Cold War certainties

The Double actor says Mila Kunis coached his Russian accent and reveals the secret of a bad date.

The actor Topher Grace says he took lessons in Russian pronunciation from Mila Kunis for his role as a CIA agent in The Double.

Perhaps the loudest (mainly female) cheers from the edges of the red carpet at this year's Abu Dhabi Film Festival so far have been those reserved for Topher Grace, the US actor who stars alongside Richard Gere in the spy thriller The Double. The film, which was co-produced by Abu Dhabi's Image Nation, a subsidiary of The National's parent company, Abu Dhabi Media, had its world premiere on Saturday night at the Abu Dhabi Theatre.

And although the film was shot in the US, mainly in Detroit, by the American director Michael Brandt and with American actors, Grace thought that having the world premiere in the Middle East helped highlight the movie's international appeal.

"When I tell a joke, I like someone who's 90 to get it and someone who's nine to get it. That's when you know it's a solid joke. And I feel the same way culturally, too," he says. "I really liked Avatar, but so did everybody else. There's something to be said about certain things that have a lot of success, there seems to be a reason."

In The Double, Grace plays a CIA agent on the hunt for a Russian assassin who is back after a 20-year exile, a story that harks back to the espionage thrillers of the Cold War.

"One of the few things that was good about the Cold War was that it provided America with a very black-and-white idea of who were the good guys and who were the bad guys," he says. "It's a different world now, but I think there's a sort of nostalgia for that, which is interesting."

Having to speak a few lines of Russian in the film saw Topher call his former That '70s Show fellow star (and Russian-born) Mila Kunis for pronunciation help. And he says that he's still in touch with many of the actors from the television programme that brought him to public attention. "I actually just went to a taping of Ashton's for Two and a Half Men."

Topher last appeared alongside Ashton Kutcher in last year's 24-hour romcom Valentine's Day, in which he has a particularly awful date with Anne Hathaway. But as far as dates go, it's not his worst. "This one time, there was some guy in a corner pointing in my direction and making noises. It was a blind date and I didn't know the girl at all well," he says. "Then he tapped his buddy and they started going 'yeah, yeah, yeah'. I thought this was so rude. So I turned to them, said, 'Excuse me, I know I'm famous, relax'. And she said to me, 'I think they're watching the football game on the TV behind you.' We're not in touch anymore."