Richard Griffiths looked tired.

It wasn’t the eight performances a week in Alan Bennett’s “The History Boys,” the most acclaimed play of the Broadway season, that was exhausting him. After all, the 58-year-old British actor has trod the stage all his life. Rather, it was the excess of press attention he has received since getting a Tony Award nomination for his performance as Hector, the drama’s iconoclastic, motorcycle-riding, lesson-shredding molder of minds.

“I don’t know how anybody gets the time to eat and go to the can,” he said, lowering his ample form into a comfortable lobby chair at the Midtown residence where producers have lodged him.That day, he had already been harried by another reporter who had called three times to check facts. “Twice to confirm the color of my shirt!” (For the record, he wore a pale blue, button-down number the day of our encounter.)

Contributing to the generally frenzied state of affairs were the remarkable events of the previous day. At the Wednesday matinee, after several cell phone eruptions, Mr. Griffiths had stopped the show and treated the audience to a lecture on etiquette. (The actor is well practiced in such impromptu sermons and once succeeded in getting a patron ejected from a London theater.) The incident was reported in several papers, winning the actor even more free publicity.

“I was really ticked off,” Mr. Griffiths explained with a calm smile. “I just pointed out the error of their ways. I always finish off with, ‘What we do here on the stage is really neither here nor there, but what really upsets people is there are a thousand others in the room and you should do nothing to show disrespect.'” He paused briefly and then articulated a stray thought: “I think the word ‘disrespect’ carries with it a catchall possibility for future legislation. It’s always small stuff that sets people off.”

Vaguely philosophical notions like that one cropped up at regular intervals during our short chat. In fact, Mr. Griffiths in person is very much reminiscent of his stage creation. Hector is a throwback; an expository, charmingly subversive trough of information who disdains exams and other visible marks of achievement, and believes that education should be a walking, talking tour of the ages, with as many intellectual digressions as possible.

Mr. Griffiths, correspondingly, eschews the idea that an interview must be a steady volley of questions and answers.When asked about his dislike of cell phones, he smoothly segues into the oafishness of today’s youths. (“They were invented, teenagers, in the 1960s,” he contended. “Before that, they didn’t exist.”) Regarding how he likes New York, he tells of the time he visited the city to find the voice for the character he was playing in a London production of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s “Once in a Lifetime.” (“I’d go on the subway. I just sat and listened to all these people and talked to them.”) An inquiry about his admiration of the late Ralph Richardson results in a lesson on how to play Falstaff. (“Don’t do jokes. Falstaff is actually a very well educated, scaly opportunist who’s out for number one. That’s what you must play first. He’s an absolute bastard.”)

This makes for quite a change from the interaction with the average actor, where talk of themselves is often terminally on offer to the exclusion of all others subjects.

Occasionally, Mr. Griffiths’s thoughts were lured by force back to the play that has given him three years of work – from London to Australia to the Broadhurst, as well as a coming movie version – and his most celebrated stage role to date. But, even then, his comments ranged far from the rote. “I was taught there were three kinds of authority, particularly in teaching,” he theorized in soft, breathy tones. “There’s traditional authority, which is based on visible signs of rank and position in a structured situation. Then there was authority achieved by reason, which is ‘Listen, I know we’re all the same. But they’ve put me in charge of the class, so I’ll lead the discussion of the group and we’ll see how we go.’ The third kind is charismatic authority. ‘Let’s do this. It’s a better idea than anything else.’ It’s what Hector is all about.”

Enlightening as these verbose responses were, they left little time to get into other biographical matters. Among the neglected areas: his childhood in Thornaby-on-Tees in northeast England, as the son of deaf parents; his early fluency in British Sign Language; the irony, given his current role, of his having dropped out of school at 15, and the experience of playing mean old Uncle Vernon in the “Harry Potter” movies.

Time was found, however, for a question about this Sunday’s Tony ceremony, where he is widely expected to win the Best Actor in a Play prize – and to give a memorably discursive acceptance speech. “I’m looking forward to it,” he said, as if suddenly recalling a forgotten dinner engagement. “Then we can get rid of it, and life can go on.”