The hole was dug. A man looked forward as the casket sunk six feet deep. Gloomy skies above, mist filling the skies, and the concerned ones filtered out one at a time.

Adam was still in a gaze.

Alone.

Not a tear shed.

Just a daze. Then a realization — he literally was standing there. Alone, with the only moisture coming from the wet skies instead of his melancholy eyes, Adam is in his own world, all by himself, unable to truly grasp the gravity of events surrounding his otherwise mundane life.

A father gone. A friend remains. A job lost. A love discovered. So much emotion, so little time to share. Only one man is up to the task, and he took a mere month to get into character.

Now, if Hugh Dancy can only figure out the message.

No, Adam is not a film about Asperger’s Sydrome. Sure, the lead character “suffered” from this rare condition. Yet, for Dancy, Adam had a deeper meaning.

“I’m always loathed to say a movie has a ‘message,’” the man who played the title character in Adam said. “A message, to me, is something you put in a bottle and throw it in the sea.”

All deep seriousness and light-hearted joking aside, Dancy got to the point pretty quickly, saying Adam is not so much about the two central characters and more about the greater issues all humanity has to deal with every day.

“If there is a message to this movie, beyond the specifics of these two individuals, I would say it’s the universal struggle, if you like, to make connections with other people, and the difficulty we find all the time in putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, either romantically or in day-to-day interactions.”

Yet, in a film that is so intricately focused on the minute nuances of the film’s title character and everyone surrounding his day-to-day life, Dancy could not help but intensely approach Adam with the requisite amount of knowledge, emotion and mindset.

“I was starting from a place of complete ignorance,” Dancy told Buzzine. “I only had a month or so (to get into character). I was trying to absorb as much raw information as I could, figure out what was useful to me. The hope was for me to build a more layered understanding of the story. I had confidence if I did the work, I’d probably be right because I trusted the script would be good enough to hang that research on.”

Perhaps the biggest struggle of all was completely leaving his own life by the wayside and just drawing upon what he calls a “well-written script” and a well-defined character to ultimately get into Adam’s head and fully delve into the role.

“I really wasn’t looking at my own life at all,” he said. “There is a strange mix, in the film, of a flatness to Adam — his delivery can be quite placid and almost monotonous. That was a challenge in and of itself — not being too monotonous. And then it spiked with these moments of quite powerful emotion from him — the anxiety, the anger. The challenge for me was to render those moments not as generic.”

Monotony, flatness and challenges aside, Dancy was ultimately drawn to how Adam interacts with his female opposite — Beth (Rose Byrne). The interaction between the two, he said, not only provided the moviegoer insight to Adam as a man, but also opened Dancy’s eyes as to how he should play the title role.

“Adam does learn about himself by having to interact with Beth,” the British actor told Buzzine. “So therefore, by definition, I learned about the character as well (by working with Byrne).”

Beyond that, there were other challenges Dancy faced in playing Adam, such as not always looking into the eyes of his co-actors while the red light was on, all in the name of accurately portraying the slightest nuances of Asperger’s Syndrome.

“That thing of not looking people in the eye was very, very odd,” he said. “Usually, in film acting, people err on the side of always looking in the eye. I felt very insecure the first couple of days.”

However, Dancy eventually found his security levels and never really had to see eye-to-eye with anyone in accurately depicting the title character of Adam. Nonetheless, the only way to appropriately enjoy Dancy’s Oscar-worthy performance is by seeing his character on an eye-to-eye level and being fully secure with the issues that confront Adam on a daily basis, due to his condition.

Once you feel secure to see eye-to-eye with Adam, be sure to find out which Los Angeles- or New York-area movie theater near you is playing the latest Fox Searchlight film, Adam.