He's big. Not tall but a solid block. Like a fridge. His hair is nicely waxed in place, his face a little raw from shaving traces of a goatee. He has to do that thing big guys have to do when walking, holding their muscled arms away from their muscled torso, giving the impression of a concrete block enclosed by brackets. Muscled brackets.

It's another manky day in July. O'Driscoll is off "for a rub" in Donnybrook after this and then to Poland with the Irish team.

He shakes the hand of the Gillette publicist, and mine, before striding up the stairs to a meeting room. "What have we got on today then?" The publicist explains. "And is it a phone interview or what?" No, it's me, I say. "Oh. Sorry."

He has the neutral enough posh northside accent, not a nasal Americanised southside one but the type of blas you find in Castleknock and Malahide and, of course, Clontarf, where he grew up. In fact, his voice would probably make a fine instrument on a radio reporter. Clear, unstuttering, unswearing and strong.

He has a lot going on at the moment, namely getting in peak physical condition for the World Cup in September. The pressure is on. "It's only the pressure from ourselves, " he begins, in a very formal interview room at a long conference table. "Of course, it's very Irish that the second the team starts doing well they expect miracles out of the team. I suppose that's not a bad thing either from our point of view. We expect very high standards from ourselves. As much as there might be an expectancy level outside, we ourselves know what we want to achieve.

"I don't mind saying that. I want to win a World Cup. With a lot going right, we have the capabilities of doing so. I think the days of shying away from that and trying to talk up opposition, we gotta try and shed that tag and expect high standards from ourselves. Because I think we've really developed as a team over the past three or four years. We've started to earn a bit of credit from our peers. Hopefully that can translate into confidence on the pitch from the boys."

The photographer pops in to takes a few snaps and O'Driscoll doesn't flinch. For all his press exposure . . . more than any other rugby player in the history of the sport in Ireland . . . there's a lot we don't know about the Bod. Like his bad eyesight. He can't see the scoreboard when he's on the pitch and his dad (also his manager) thinks he's so good at running through gaps because he sees openings that aren't actually there.

"It's not great, " he says about his vision. His face scrunches up completely when he smirks . . . it's very endearing. "I've tried to wear contacts years ago and, literally in the first minute, someone stuck their finger in my eye and the contact flipped out. I can still see pretty much everything I need to see.

I mightn't be able to see scoreboards or my parents standing for the anthem. I can hear my dad but not see him. Other than that I don't really struggle, only with bad floodlights." He used to hate wearing glasses, but he doesn't care any more.

O'Driscoll grew up here, in Clontarf. His parents, both doctors, work in a surgery around the corner. He went to school in Belgrove and played soccer for Donaghmede Boys, midfield.

"I was alright actually, " he says with a smile. As a kid, he hung around the estates with his friends. "I was probably a little bit of a late developer with regard to getting out and going out.

Maybe 15, 16 I kind of started branching out a little bit. . . It really depended on who had a free house. Whether we were playing a game of soccer or whatever we were doing. I got up to the same mischief as any young teenager."

His dad sent him to Blackrock, thinking he'd like rugby.

Immediately, he was slagged for being a northsider. "It was a funny situation. I was slagged for being a northsider in Blackrock but then when I went out and played with Donaghmede Boys I was slagged for being a snobby northsider in Clontarf.

It was like, 'Give me some even ground here somewhere.' Only when I was in Clontarf was I really comfortable. Nothing that I couldn't handle. Northside knacker, you know?" Hordly says you, I say. "Yeah, " he laughs. "Maybe that was when I started developing my thick skin."

Rugby was tough at first for "a small guy". He got knocked around. Then, at 15, 16, O'Driscoll filled out and the playing field was level. After that, it all happened very quickly. Studying a diploma in sports management in UCD, himself and Gordon D'Arcy were called to train with the senior Irish team. It was not as tough as he expected. He held his own. Soon he was on the bench during the Six Nations.

"For a young guy . . . I was a 20-year-old . . . I didn't know a lot about life in general and you grow up very quickly being thrown into situations like that. You learn the ways of the world when you're hanging out with guys 10, 12 years older than you.

And you're invovled in conversations that far exceed the intellectual capacities of a 19- or 20-year-old's conversation.

So yeah, I did grow up quickly in that period of time."

All of a sudden he was captaining the team. All of a sudden he was the best Irish man to ever play the sport. All of a sudden he was one of the best in the world. It doesn't seem to phase him, though it must. He's hard to crack, so I ask him to tell me something about him no one would believe. He leans back.

"Emmm." There's a long pause, maybe a minute. All the time he whispers to himself, "Something about me no one would believe." Eventually he looks up apologetically, "I'm real bad at answering the, the em, the real 'tell me the worst thing that ever happened to you' stuff. There's a million things that never spring to mind. Let me think now." His head goes down.

"That no one would believe. . . ."

Another half a minute passes. "I suppose, it's not, em, things like, I can be quite stubborn, I suppose? For periods of time. Not so much these days. But I used to be very, incredibly stubborn. And I suppose not having difficulty in admitting that I was wrong but, em, just putting my feet down. I can be stubborn with certain things. I'll tell you what, I'm very much an excessive sort of person. Em. I do extremes in things.

Like with regards to training and with regards to sometimes I overdo it on nights out. It's not a good trait. I could eat terribly for a month and realise that I've put on some bad weight and completely go the flipside to it and eat nothing but boiled chicken for the next month. I'm very much an extremist." I say a lot of sportsmen are like that . . . David Beckham has OCD, Johnny Wilkinson. . . "Well he's an extremist on the good side!"

Now there's no stopping him. "I'd like to have OCD with regards to having my house clean and my car clean! I've got five weeks now of having to clean the house myself." (His cleaner has taken an unexplained five-week break. ) "Every few days I'll try and make sure it's ok. Annoying things like, I'm not good for the aul changing of bedclothes and that sort of thing. It'll have to be done because I refuse to sleep in the same bed clothes for five weeks, " he laughs. "But, em, that's just very irritating.

I hate that sort of stuff.

"The only thing about living on your own . . . the last year is the first time I've lived on my own . . . the only thing that I can say about it is, it's your mess. You know it's your mess and there's no one else to come along and clean it up. I only have a cleaner once a fortnight. So if I mess the house two days after she's gone, it's a long time to be waiting. At least you know and you snap every so often and go, 'Look at the state of the house that you're living in. This is a disgrace if you brought anyone into this house.' And then I'll just do half an hour blitzing the place and it'll be fine again. I'll buy some flowers and try to make the place smell ok."

When he first moved in he had a lot of parties ("ask the neighbours") but he's calmed down now. The only thing he really hasn't got used to is bathroom maintenance. "I don't think I can clean toilets. I haven't ever. That probably isn't worth mentioning in the article, that for five weeks my toilets will not be cleaned, " he giggles. "I'd struggle to clean bathrooms. Anything else is fine, provided all your machinery and everything is working ok. It's not overly taxing to put clothes in the washing machine or into a drier or put dishes in a dishwasher."

When he goes into his house, the first thing he does is switch on the music channels (he likes Bruce Springsteen). And with a lot of travelling, there's a lot of DVD boxsets to be watched. "I'd have to say, it's probably more of a chick's thing, but Grey's Anatomy I think is very, very good. It's really, really good. It pulls on the old heartstrings. My favourite programme of all time is probably The Simpsons."

That's about as close to his personal life as you'll get these days. In the Glenda Gilson-dating days, things were a little more open, leading O'Driscoll to become tabloid-fodder, something he is keen to avoid with his reported girlfriend, actress Amy Huberman. "You become fairly thick-skinned when you read certain things about yourself. . . It's rare enough that I'd get affected by something written in a paper." He starts to doodle on the writing pad in front of him with a pencil. "It's not nice because people build perceptions of what you're like without ever really knowing you. To be honest, people can do whatever they want because I know my family and my close friends are the ones who know the truth. They know a huge amount of what's written isn't true or it's very much tails are grown on each story.

"I suppose, there's a small price to pay for being in the public eye. People are going to be interested in the public side of you besides the sporting side. With being involved in endorsing products as well, you have to expect a certain amount of heat from that area. I try and keep my personal life as personal as I can. I've in the past made mistakes in certain areas, in a lot of areas in my life, personally, on a rugby level, in appearing in certain things here and there. You know, it's a learning curve as well. Once you don't make that mistake another time. . ."

Is he happy? He folds his arms and smirks, "I'm very happy with where I am in life at the minute, " as though reading a prepared statement.

Afterwards, he chats about the dangers of burning your nipples in cryogenic chambers. "You have to protect these guys, " he says clutching his chest. He picks his keys off the table. What do you drive Brian? "A Lexus." Very nice. "Yeah, they're very good to me." He is somewhat guarded. Free of banter. Professional and a little standoff-ish. You can't really complain because he answers the questions and is very pleasant but there's no way he'd be so foolish as to say something controversial. Why screw up what he has? He trots down a staircase singing a few bars of Mika's 'Love Today' to himself before the shots are taken. He obliges with the photographer's requests.

He holds open doors, gets the pictures done in near silence and then almost crushes my hand with a parting shake. And off he zooms for his massage in D4.

Brian uses the Gillette Fusion Razor, Hydra Gel and After Shave Balm. For further information go to www. mygillette. ie

Brian O'Driscoll
Age: 28
From: Clontarf, Dublin
Education: Blackrock College Lives: Clonskeagh, Dublin
Job: captain of the Irish rugby team Parents: doctors
Loves: 'Grey's Anatomy', endorsing products
Hates: cleaning toilets, talking about his relationships
Pros: bone-crushing handshake, nice Lexus
Cons: terrible eyesight, hums Mika songs Don't say: 'metrosexual' Do say: 'ledge'