Submitted photo / McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceClive Owen plays a brilliant but drug-addicted surgeon at Knickerbocker Hospital in 1900s New York in the Cinemax series “The Knick,” which is based on a real physician with documented surgeries and premieres Aug. 8.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Though actor Clive Owen has played everything from a con man to a king, he’s never quite sure he’s up to the task.

“The unusual thing about acting is no matter how much you’ve done or how much you’ve learned, you can fall flat on your face every time,” he says, seated at a birch table in a hotel room.

“You can be bad every time you play a part. There are no rules. Experience helps, and knowing certain things helps, but ultimately I like a challenge. I don’t want to do things that are easy. I don’t want to do things that sit comfortably. I want to go, ‘Wow, I’ve never done that before. Let’s try that.’”

One example was his appearance as Ernest Hemingway in HBO’s “Hemingway & Gellhorn.” “I look nothing like the guy,” he says with a laugh. “I’m thin, I’m English, what am I even thinking?”

But his latest role, as a gifted, drug-addicted doctor at New York’s Knickerbocker Hospital, is a hairpin turn for Owen. Based on a real physician with documented cases and surgeries, “The Knick,” premiering Aug. 8 on Cinemax, offers an insider’s view of medicine in the 1900s.

It’s a far cry from the real Owen, 49, whose father left his family of five boys when Clive was 3. His stepfather worked for British rail, but Owen admits there were difficult days. “Times were tough back then, but they were for a lot of people,” he shrugs.

“It was a depressed time in the U.K., a lot of unemployment. Certainly where I grew up, Coventry, was a very depressed area. We had a lot of car factories that closed down, a lot of unemployment.”

When he was 13 — and had never thought of acting — he was assigned the role of the Artful Dodger in “Oliver.” He thought nothing of it, but once on stage, he says, he felt a calling.

“And I went, ‘I’m going to do this. I don’t know why. I don’t know how.’

“I didn’t know what that was. It was a school play. It was not a great thing. But there was something about it that just set me alight. I was unerring from that moment on, saying, ‘I’m GOING to do this.’

“I’ve been playing the Artful Dodger ever since,” he says, chuckling, “with less singing.”

Featured in such projects as “The Bourne Identity,” “Children of Men” and “King Arthur,” Owen’s most pivotal role came when he was 24 and played Romeo to Sarah-Jane Fenton’s Juliet.

“It was pretty much love at first sight,” he says of Sarah-Jane, now his wife. “She was late for the read-through, and she’d been touring bookshops. She came in with a pair of glasses on and dropping books all over the floor and apologizing for being late. I thought, ‘She’s fantastic!’

“What she admitted to me afterward was when we started to do the play, the balcony scene — I thought we were on fire — in. But she told me later she couldn’t even see me. She was so shortsighted that I was like a blur and a voice. I thought I’d made this amazing connection with this woman here. And she said, ‘I couldn’t even see you.’”

They have two daughters, 17 and 15. When their first daughter, Hannah, was born, Owen says he thought, “‘What a miracle!’ When we left the hospital I did think, ‘Why on Earth are they leaving us to look after this child? This shouldn’t be allowed to happen.’ I wanted to have kids and was sooo happy.”

Being a father has taught him a rueful lesson, he says. He made the mistake of starring in three movies back-to-back. “One would be starting, I’d be finishing another and jump on to the next one. And by the time it came to the last one, I was exhausted. It was a lesson I learned: I never want to do this again. I’ve always been better if I’ve had time to prepare. I’m not good at going from one thing to the next. I just don’t function well. … I realized I had to learn to say no.”

After winding up the 10-part series of “The Knick,” he and the family are driving the scenic coastal route from Los Angeles to San Francisco to visit friends. “My kids are at an age when I’m thinking, ‘They’re not going to be around much longer. They’re going to go off to college.’ That has also made me think about the amount of time I spend away, because you don’t get this time back.”