Peaky Blinders star Sam Claflin: ‘Jeremy Irons spoke to a dummy for four minutes thinking it was me’

The other day, a director started talking to Sam Claflin about the unexpected shape of his career. "He said to me, 'What happened to you? You were going up and up in this direction, and then, suddenly," Claflin stretches his arm out horizontally, "'you went over there.'" Claflin shrugs. "I don't know if that swerve in ­direction damaged my career or not. But I needed to shake the tree."

For a long time it seemed (not least to Claflin himself) that he was barely in a film that didn't require him to take off his shirt. He was frequently bare-chested as the sword-wielding hunk Finnick Odair in The Hunger Games franchise. He whipped off his shirt as William in 2012's Snow White and the Huntsman. The first time it happened, during the fourth instalment of Pirates of the Caribbean , in 2011, in which he played the missionary Philip Swift, showing his abs wasn't even part of the script. "They decided a week before filming that I was going to take my top off," he says. "I was like, what? I hadn't done any of that Hollywood thing, such as eating properly or going to the gym. Instead, I'd been drinking beer and eating like a ­student. So to be told you had to go shirtless, in your first Hollywood movie, with only a week to prepare, was slightly terrifying."

Moreover, still barely out of drama school – he graduated from Lamda in 2009 – he lacked the courage to resist. "It happened at a time in my career when I was so young, I felt I couldn't say no. Call it imposter syndrome, but I was really afraid of being caught out, of ­people thinking I couldn't act. Of course I was saying, 'Yes sir, yes sir, whatever you need me to do.'"

So, several years ago, Claflin, 39, decided to change tack. Realising that he was on a trajectory that on one level might easily result in blockbuster-level stardom, but which also might mean playing what he calls "the same character over again but in different costumes", he set about going against type. He was up for the role of Miles Richards in The Riot Club , but pol­itely persuaded the casting director to let him read for the more obnoxious character of Alistair Ryle, too – which he got.

He successfully auditioned for the part of the murderous rapist Hawkins in the 2018 Australian thriller The Nightingale , despite the director telling him he wasn't quite right. "Which only made me more determined to prove them wrong," he says. He's portrayed Oswald Mosley in Peaky Blinders and Sherlock ­Holmes's malicious brother Mycroft in Enola Holmes . "Before The Riot Club, I'd only ever played the good guy, the one who got the girl," he says. "I was very conscious of being pigeonholed. I knew I needed to take riskier roles. Who knows if it paid off?"

According to the Golden Globes, it has – last year, he was nominated for his portrayal of the narcissistic rock-band frontman Billy in Amazon's adap­tation of the hit novel Daisy Jones & the Six . And now he's back on screen in Bille August's TV adap­tation of The Count of Monte Cristo, in which he plays Alexandre­ Dumas's dreadfully damaged, magnificently unforgiving, 19th-­century French avenger, who, after spending 14 years in a stone-walled island prison, having been framed by his fiancée's jealous cousin, is implac­ably focused on retribution.

"The hardest part was, once I'd escaped from prison, having to act like someone who was utterly dead inside," says Claflin, who admits the most vindictive he gets in real life is becoming a little bit cross when someone cuts him up at the traffic lights. "I'd have the scenes with my former fiancée, Mércèdes, who'd be crying [she marries the count's ­nemesis in his absence, unaware of what he has done], and, because of the sort of person I am, I'd instinctively want to hug her. But the point about Cristo is that his rage and hatred over what has happened to him is overpowering. So that was a challenge."

On one level, The Count of Monte Cristo plays to Claflin's natural appeal as an epic adventure hero, not least because August's production is exquisitely filmed and much of it has the photographic beauty of a magazine shoot. Yet the story's swaggering melodrama – it's a relentless tale of betrayal, fury and forgiveness, which sees the count adopt many masks in his pursuit of justice – also showcases his talent for combining a delicate emotional sensitivity with a more savage, muscular darkness.

The show also stars Jeremy Irons as his benevolent cellmate, Abbé Faria: how did he find working with him? "He's very vivacious, but also quite eccentric. At one point, the producers had a dummy of my body made for the scene in which I'm thrown off a cliff. During filming, Jeremy came across it and started talking to it, assuming it was me. For four whole minutes. Obviously, 'I' didn't say a word in response during that time, but he carried on regardless."

I've met Claflin in a central ­London hotel during a day of back-to-back interviews. He has a repu­tation for being terribly nice, and in person he emanates a lovely, shy sweetness, as though he still can't quite believe anyone would want to talk to him. He is nearly 40, but even now has an undeniable, chiselled boyishness. Yet for years he felt deeply insecure about his looks, his self-perception at odds with the way the film industry saw him.

"I was always really short until I was 18, so I never thought of myself in any way as a leading man," he says. "As a kid, I played Dodger in Oliver!, Zoltan Karpathy in My Fair Lady. I assumed I'd become a character actor. When I was cast in Pirates, I thought, 'What on earth am I doing here?'" It wasn't an entirely healthy feeling and soon Claflin was going to extremes to fit in. "There is this Hollywood assumption that it's the men with the six packs who sell the movie. So there was a pressure that that was what I needed to look like. As a result, I developed a form of body dysmorphia. It wasn't quite an eating disorder, and I'm not blaming anyone but myself, but it was definitely because of the industry I'm in."

Does he think young male actors find it harder to protest against this sort of pressure than actresses, who have become much more vocal in recent years at the reductive roles many of them are expected to play? "We're men and we are not allowed to talk about our feelings," he says. "But I've got much better. These days, I'm definitely not afraid of speaking about how I feel. And I also realised I didn't want a career in Hollywood. I wanted to come home and become a dad."

Claflin, who has two children under 10 with his ex-wife, the actress Laura Haddock, whom he married in 2013, grew up in ­Norwich. A keen footballer, he had no intention of becoming an actor until an injury forced him to find something else to do with his time – "anything that didn't involve reading or writing, basically". He fell in with a local drama club and loved it, but when he told his parents he wanted to become an actor, they were shocked. "They thought that meant I was going to do musicals for the rest of my life. With my upbringing, acting as a career was unheard of. I went to a very rough school. Most people from where I come from become a mechanic or go into the army."

He won a place at Lamda, but his student grant didn't cover the costs of living in London. So he took part-time jobs within the college to make ends meet – working as a waiter at functions and hired by teachers at week­ends to help with their ­gardens. "My parents have always been wonderfully loving and supportive, but I've got three brothers and there was never any money. There's no way they could have afforded to send me. And there is no way I could have survived if the ­college hadn't helped."

Much has been written about the way in which drama schools are becoming increasingly prohibitive for working-class actors. "The odds are against us, definitely," says Claflin. "That's not to say the whole industry is geared more towards middle- and upper-class people, but there are definitely more of those actors in the pool because they have more oppor­tunities to be there in the first place. That's a ­systemic issue. I was bullied at my drama club because I spoke in a working-class accent. I adopted this posher accent to survive."

It must have been a bit exhausting, being inside the younger Claflin's head. Besieged by self-doubt, constantly worrying about his identity and how he came across. Today, he is self-assured and calm, thanks in no small part to undergoing therapy after the break-up of his marriage. 

He has a raft of projects coming out this year, including Harlan Coben's Lazarus, for Amazon Prime , in which he stars alongside Bill Nighy; and after years of feeling terribly homesick and unhappy in Los Angeles, is now settled in west London, close to Haddock, being a normal dad who happens to have a second life as a film star. "When I was younger, I was so desperate to do a good job, I was overthinking it. I probably failed to have as much fun as I should have. But I'm nearly 40 now. I can now think, 'I've been doing this for 15 years. I only need to please myself.' And so the pressure is off."

The Count of Monte Cristo airs on U&Drama at 9pm on Saturday 2 August

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