Interview: Henry Lloyd-Hughes, actor

‘So, there I was, improvising lines, for a film script I’d never read, with two huge grizzly bears, as I went blind…” Sitting in The Scotsman Hotel ahead of the Edinburgh International Film Festival premiere of his new film Weekender, Henry Lloyd-Hughes is recounting his weirdest experience on a film set.

It happened last year while making the film Anonymous in Berlin. The up-and-coming Brit actor wasn’t supposed to be in the film – a thriller by Independence Day director Roland Emmerich examining whether Shakespeare was a fraud. Instead, having just finished an acclaimed run in the Royal Court’s production of Posh (Laura Wade’s thinly veiled play about the Bullingdon Club), he’d decided to visit his friend, the actor Rafe Spall, who was in the midst of shooting Anonymous in the German capital.

“He basically said, ‘Look, I’ve got this flat, the producers can put you up,’ so I went there to unwind.”

The moment he arrived, however, he was offered a small non-speaking part. As a bear baiter. “Then I turned up on set and Roland was like, ‘I’ve given you a speech and I want you to write 20 more lines,’” says Lloyd-Hughes, chuckling at the memory of suddenly being asked to improvise cod-Jacobean language with no knowledge of the script while negotiating a leather codpiece, a curly shoulder-length wig and a pair of six-foot grizzlies. “And the worst bit was, I’d bought a batch of faulty contact lens solution that sent me blind midway through that day’s filming.” He laughs again.

“The good news is that Roland definitely included it in the film. He got in contact with me and said ‘I thought what you did was fantastic,’ so at least all the stress wasn’t for nothing.”

Lloyd-Hughes seems to like this unpredictable side of his chosen profession. Since getting an agent at 17 (he’s now 26), it’s what has enabled this Londoner to bounce between bit parts in Harry Potter (he was in The Goblet of Fire) and acclaimed theatre work, hit TV shows (he played school bully Mark Donovan in The Inbetweeners, a role he reprised for the current box-office-conquering film version), arthouse films and even a bit of cheeky political satire (he played David Miliband in Channel 4’s quickly convened Miliband of Brothers).

It’s also why he can be philosophical about, say, being turned down for a role as a scientist in World War Z – “They ended up casting someone 20 years older than me” – because he knows that as much as auditioning can be a “war of attrition”, he also knows you can simply “be in Berlin at the right time and someone offers you a part in a $50 million movie.”

As it happens, being in the right place at the right time is one of the themes of Weekender, a fictionalised take on the rave scene of the early 1990s that finds him playing a low-prospects twenty-something who becomes one of the early pioneers of club culture. Lloyd-Hughes was only five when the events depicted in the film were taking place, but he felt connected to the material thanks to growing up with friends whose big brothers were all party to that original idealistic ethos of bringing people together in abandoned spaces to dance the night away. If the film is a little light on social history (it pays lip service to controversial Criminal Justice Bill and the police crackdown that accompanied the scene) Lloyd-Hughes doesn’t see that as a problem.

“I think that Karl [Golden, the director] didn’t want to make it too much of a state-of-the-nation address because then you start drawing contemporary parallels and it’s not as simple as that. I think it’s more about the ideas that people were having at the time rather than making political comments.”

Not that Lloyd-Hughes shies away from material that’s political. After Miliband of Brothers screened on the day of last year’s Labour leadership election contest, he wasn’t sure what the reaction would be, but heard on the grapevine that senior members of the Labour Party thought it was all rather hilarious.

“I took it seriously, but I think they were relieved that we played up the ridiculousness of it. I do hope I never pass David in the corridors of power, though.”

Given that his own younger brother Ben played Ed Miliband, could he relate to the pressure of a younger sibling snapping at his heels? “You’d think I would,” he says, “but for two people who are so similar we have different aspirations in terms of the jobs we want to do. I probably have slightly more esoteric tastes.”

He’s not kidding. As much as he enjoyed being a small part of the Potter phenomenon, for instance (and he still marvels at the fact that fans continue to send him letters every month), he finds it much more gratifying when people ask him about working with Archipelago director Joanna Hogg on her debut film Unrelated.

“Blimey, have you seen it? You must be about one of three people,” he says. “I really appreciate that, because I think it’s a really unique film. It’s one of those projects I’m really proud of.”

As far as his career goes, the only thing he really fears is repetition, though there seems little chance of that. Already in the can is another lead role in a 1920s-set time-travel caper called Dimensions, and he’s also recently started working on A Fantastic Fear of Everything with Simon Pegg. Based on a novella by Withnail and I writer Bruce Robinson, and marking the writing and directing debut of Crispian Mills – grandson of John Mills, son of Hayley Mills and, yes, former lead singer with Britpop also-rans Kula Shaker – the latter is, beams Lloyd-Hughes, another weird one: “I play this incredibly bad-ass policeman who is a figment of Simon Pegg’s character’s imagination. He’s basically his worst nightmare. I turn up to haunt him. And shoot him with a taser gun.”

l The Inbetweeners Movie is out now; Weekender will be in cinemas on 2 September (and will be available on DVD, Blu-Ray and download from 19 September); Anonymous is released on 28 October.