Method in rapper's ambition as he trades music for movies

Asock-clad Method Man pads into the hallway of his Staten Island home. On the stove in the kitchen, an inviting dish sits cooling. Floral arrangements fill the dining room table. The news plays unobtrusively in the background.

"Welcome to suburbia," says the hardcore rhymer, with just a hint of irony. He opens the front door to reveal a sleepy, snowy street, where so few cars pass that a neighbour has put a basketball hoop in the middle of the road.

Method Man - born Clifford Smith - is leading the kind of domestic life that might surprise those familiar with his work as a solo artist and member of the groundbreaking rap collective the Wu-Tang Clan. He once dropped verses such as "Shame on a n***** who try to run game on a n*****, Wu buck wild with the trigger", but the greatest danger in his life these days is announced by a handwritten sign on the inside of his front door. "There's a killer on the loose!" says the endearing scrawl next to a stick figure, apparently some inside joke by or for one of his three children.

But then there are many things unexpected about Smith's world circa 2015 - not least that unlike many of the rapper-actors who toggle between the realms, he has set music almost completely aside in favour of the thespian life.

Smith has just returned from Los Angeles, where he auditioned for parts including one in the upcoming Cinemax dramatic thriller Quarry. It's been nearly 15 years since Smith began his acting career. But what had seemed like promising turns via early parts in Oz and The Wire - not to mention a starring nod to his own smoking ways in the 2001 stoner comedy How High - have dissipated into less memorable bit parts of late.

So he is, he says, making a renewed push. Recently Smith was on the big screen in The Cobbler, the new body-switching dramedy from director Thomas McCarthy. And this summer will offer Smith as an uptight medical orderly in the Judd Apatow comedy Trainwreck.