Huddling out of the brutal cold in an improvised crew canteen in central Tasmania – dressed in a natty red coat, grey britches and luxurious sideburns to play a hardcore soldier in the new Australian thriller The Nightingale – Sam Claflin is facing an awkward case of mistaken identity.

He might have had splashy roles in three big Hollywood franchises – Pirates of the Caribbean, Snow White and the Huntsman and The Hunger Games – but his clueless interviewer has admitted to thinking it was another boyish English actor in the recent World War II drama The Finest.

One moment Claflin is being called a “Hunger Games heart-throb” in the British media and starring in a bold film that is director Jennifer Kent’s follow-up to the horror hit The Babadook. The next he is being confused with Nicholas Hoult from the X-Men movies and Mad Max: Fury Road.

“We’ve had that before,” Claflin says cheerfully, not in the least offended. “I’ve met him a couple of times on social occasions and he’s a lovely guy. I’m actually a really big fan of his work and he has a tendency to get most jobs I go for.”

The 30-year-old prefers to see his X-Men rival as inspiration rather than competition. “I feel like he has the career I’d like to have,” he says. “He’s had more of an opportunity to branch out from playing leading men. He’s played some really, really interesting characters.”

In the nine years since he left drama school in London, Claflin has managed to land the odd role of his own. He played an idealistic cleric in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Snow White’s childhood friend in two Snow White and the Huntsman movies and a charismatic contestant in three movies in The Hunger Games series.

He took to a wheelchair for the romance Me Before You  and now plays a naive young landholder who is captivated by a glamorous widow in the English romantic thriller My Cousin Rachel.

For anyone who still can’t quite place Claflin, he is also not Eddie Redmayne, that other boyishly pretty English actor from The Theory of Everything  and The Danish Girl. When they starred together in the 2010 mini-series The Pillars of the Earth, the future Oscar winner became a mentor.

“He was a bit earlier than me getting out of the gate,” Claflin says. “He completely took me under his wing and became a close friend for a while.”

After years of auditioning against a bright new generation of British actors, Claflin is philosophical about losing roles to them.

“There are so many roles that I’m not right for and it will go to someone like Eddie Redmayne or Nic Hoult,” he says. “And I’ll go ‘that’s much better.’ I’m happy for the project that they’ve got it.”

Not that the 30-year-old has much to complain about. That very day, it was announced that he will shoot Adrift, a drama about a couple trying to survive at sea after a hurricane wrecks their boat, in Fiji when The Nightingale wraps. Variety reports he will star opposite Shailene Woodley after Miles Teller (Whiplash, War Dogs) dropped out of discussions.

Growing up as one of four brothers in a family with no artistic background in Norwich – his father worked in tax and his mother is a classroom assistant – Claflin was mad about football as a boy. “My Mum claims she always saw the actor in me, even when I used to play soccer growing up,” he says. “I was always very dramatic on the pitch.”

But any dreams of playing professionally for his beloved Chelsea vanished when Claflin broke his ankle aged 16 and quickly found a new obsession by joining the school drama club.

“It completely overtook my life, overtook every passion I’ve ever had,” he says. “It became my life. I really enjoyed playing other people and hiding myself.”

Claflin studied acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art – past students include Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kim Cattrall and Donald Sutherland – and landed his first agent but struggled to get any acting work.

“I auditioned so many times when I first signed with him,” he says. “Much to my dismay nothing came about for, like, six months of auditioning three, four times a week. Then I managed to get one role – in The Pillars of the Earth – that we shot out in Hungary for six months.

“The producers offered me a second role immediately after – a TV film. And Matthew Macfadyen [who was also in The Pillars of the Earth] put my name forward for my third TV job, to play a younger version of him.

“So literally that first job just branched out. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know because obviously I have no talent. It’s pure luck.”

When Claflin auditioned for the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, he had yet to be paid for any of those jobs so – $50,000 in debt from his student fees – he had to borrow money from his parents to fly to Los Angeles and stay in a package deal hotel.

“All of a sudden I was shooting out in Hawaii and sat next to Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz and working with [director] Rob Marshall on a pirate ship,” he says. “The bug hit me. I knew that was what I wanted to explore further.”

Claflin made his biggest impact when he went blond and bare-chested to play Finnick in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. It was a role he was determined to win.

“I knew they were looking everywhere,” he says. “I was ‘right, I’m going to prove everyone wrong. I’m going to lose all the weight, dye my hair blond, get a tan’ – everything I’m not. ‘I’m going to change and I’m going to make this character come to life.’

“It was definitely the hardest I’d worked fully and the best I understood a character and a world and a script and a story. That was the birth of the actor I am today.”

Having turned 30 and become a father – he has a son with wife Laura Haddock, an actor who has been in both Guardians of the Galaxy movies – Claflin is ready to move on from playing boyish 21-year-olds. “I don’t want to be less masculine,” he says. “I don’t want to be a boy any more. I want to be a man.”

He might have won the genetic version of the football pools but Claflin admits to continuing insecurities about his looks. He can identify with some of the bad experiences he has heard about from his wife and other female actors.

“I read in an interview recently and I think it’s absolutely true: men have it just as bad,” he says. “Well, not just as bad but they get it bad and it’s never talked about.

“I remember doing one job when they literally made me pull my shirt up and were grabbing my fat and going ‘you need to lose a bit of weight’. This other time they were slapping me. I felt like a piece of meat.

“I’m not saying it’s anywhere near as bad as what women go through but I, as an actor approaching each job, am insecure – especially when I have to take my top off in it – and so nervous. I get really worked up to the point where I spend hours and hours in the gym and not eating for weeks to achieve what I think they’re going for.”

Claflin recognises this pressure for perfect bodies in movies affects the perception of what’s normal.

“In the ’50s and ’60s, it was never an issue,” he says. “James Bond never had a six pack. He had a hairy chest.

“Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire had an incredible body but he was by no means ripped to within an inch of his life. There’s a filter on society that this is normal but actually it’s anything but normal.”

In My Cousin Rachel, Claflin plays a Mr Darcy-like character – in puffy shirt and britches – in the lavish period film written and directed by Roger Michell (Notting Hill, Le Weekend). It’s based on a Daphne du Maurier novel that was previously adapted into a 1952 film starring Richard Burton and Olivia de Havilland.

In this version, the glamorous widow who arrives in 19th-century Cornwall from Italy is played by Rachel Weisz.

“It’s everyone’s dream to be the next Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice,” Claflin says. “It’s a great era. I love period dramas, purely because there’s so much history in them. The minute you get into one of those costumes and see the sets, you feel a part of history.”

Claflin plays Philip, the headstrong inheritor of a rural estate who falls hard for his exotic cousin but struggles to work out whether she is his genuine true love or an evil manipulator.

“He’s an unlikeable rogue, I suppose,” he says. “What I found interesting is when you first meet him, he thinks he’s a man. He knows everything about the world – ‘women are this’ and ‘this is that’ and ‘this should be like this’.

“But the minute a woman comes into his life, he becomes like a teenage boy. He’s never experienced love like this and he’s fretting. He also has no real friends. There’s an isolation to him that I found so interesting and so unique and so original – the tortured soul of a man who lives alone. It’s a different way of telling a coming-of-age story.”

When he finishes work on The Nightingale, Claflin is more than ready to take over parenting duties from Haddock, who plays an Oxford professor in the next Transformers movie. They met at an audition – adding fuel to the theory that the movie business is just a front for a dating agency for actors.

“I was on my fourth recall for a film and she was sat there reading the part of the girl,” Claflin says. “I walked out and called my agent and said ‘I’ve just fallen in love.’ I think she had a boyfriend at the time but we kept bumping into each other.”

Now with 18-month-old son Pip, they form what Haddock described recently as “a little vagabond family”. So did they both get the job when they auditioned?

“Neither of us did,” Claflin says with a laugh. “Eddie Redmayne got that one.”

My Cousin Rachel is out on June 8.

(source)