Clive Owen has never been interested in being comfortable.

From Spike Lee’s Inside Man and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men to Robert Altman’s Gosford Park and Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick, the actor has worked with a range of filmmakers across an expanse of projects spanning film, television and the stage.

“I like to choose things that scare me a little bit, something that I haven’t done before. When you look at everything I’ve done, it’s a very mixed bag,” says Owen.

When it came to the Mike Nichols film Closer, it was one of the few instances where Owen was willing to retread some known territory. He had starred in the first staging of the Patrick Marber play about the intertwining lives of two couples at the Royal Theater Company and, less than a decade later, he got word that Nichols would like...