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Dazed & Confused met Jamie Bell for breakfast in a Hoxton Square café after the 21-year-old actor had flown in from his home in New York to talk about his latest role in David Mackenzie’s dark coming of age tale, Hallam Foe. Dazed Digital: What draws you to outsider, misfit roles like Hallam?

Jamie Bell: They’re the most interesting characters to play. A lot of these roles – especially in studio movies you get offered – there's often nothing in those characters, they're not going through anything, there's nothing that I really connect with on a personal level. With films like Undertow and some other small films that I've done, the characters seem grounded in some kind of reality, which I can relate to. Working with Peter Jackson and Clint Eastwood, they're amazing directors, they're really visionary, great storytellers, but they're kind of set in their ways. They're like, 'This is how it is. This is what it's going to be’, and that's fine, but as an actor, you just end up being a cog in the works. You're just playing a character where things are pretty simple. I much prefer the Hallam Foes, the characters who are just a little bit insane and there's something eccentric about them. He only connects with freaks and geeks, people who are kind of like him, and to a certain extent that's fine. I think he wants to reach out to people, but he doesn't really know how to. He extradites himself, he removes himself from the family so he’s not dealing with his mother’s suicide. So his infatuation with her is kind of out of respect as well. It's kind of like mourning, mourning the loss of such an important figure in a person's life. Hallam watches people because he's trying to take over, maybe from where his mother left off. He's trying to simply figure it out. What's it about? What are we all doing here? What am I supposed to be doing? Am I supposed to be falling in love? There's definitely nothing perverted in it. It's purely just about learning. And by the end, he's found a way through that one particular problem – the guilt, or the hatred towards his father. This is a chronicle of one problem in this guy's life that's just kind of haunted him, or consumed him.

Dazed Digital: Hallam Foe is your first British film since Billy Elliot. What enticed you back?

Jamie Bell: I just needed another movie with a name in the title! No, I love this country, I love London, I love England, it's part of who I am, it's my heritage. So making films here is incredibly important. The British film industry has certain kind of films it makes, and Hallam Foe is just not one of those. And it's rare, that one like this comes along, so when you see that with British filmmakers, British money, of course you have to jump at that opportunity.

Dazed Digital: This was your first ever sex scene. How did it go?

Jamie Bell:It was really awkward. I'd never done it before – onscreen, obviously! It's weird when you see sex scenes in movies and you never think about how that must be for the actors, for some reason you just accept it. It’s like, ‘Lights, action, and cut’ and… not that you're ever romantic with the person, because it's purely for the movie. It's hard to explain. It's just well awkward, in a nutshell. Then you get all these 'What happens if' problems… ‘What happens if I get an erection? What happens if I don't get an erection? Is she going to be upset?’ There's a lot of things to consider! We were in this treehouse, in the middle of this wooded area in Scotland – I know that is very generic and random as fuck but I can't remember exactly where it was in Scotland… but it was freezing cold, I mean, this was March, April and I'd walk up to David and say, ‘Oh David, I should wear a sock. He's like, don't worry about the sock. So I'm butt naked in the treehouse? He's like… ‘yeah’.

Dazed Digital: You were saying that in the last three months all the scripts that have come through your door have been studio movies. Is it hard to stick with independent film roles?

Jamie Bell: "It's fucking hard man. I find this industry increasingly more difficult. Although what I have realised is that it's easy to be famous. It's so simple. Go and make a shit movie and sell your soul to the devil, and get famous. Or 'successful', but meaning in a ‘Hollywood Reporter’ successful way, where agents are calling each other saying, 'Oh my god, have you seen, he's in this new movie.' I've realised now, that isn't hard to attain. But that's not what you want. And the problem is, in order to get to that point you have to sell your soul. And this is what is fucking annoying. To get things made, yeah, you have to sell your soul. It's so devastating in a way. And I've always kind of known that, but haven't really faced the facts, or faced the music before. I've always been like, 'Oh I'm just going to be independent and fuck it."

Dazed Digital: What’s next for you?

Jamie Bell: I’m doing Jumper… here we go, see, this is where I start contradicting myself. It's Doug Lyman, who did Go and Swingers, oh and Bourne Identity and Mr & Mrs Smith, yeah, fine, those two big successful movies. It's his first step into more of a sci-fi genre. I see it as a very hip new comic book movie, but without all of that given mythology. Those are all set in the solid mythology of comic books. But this is a much more off the hip indie comic movie, but made with a lot more money and with 20th Century Fox. That movie has been going on for a year. And it's really depressing. I love Doug Lyman, he's nuts. And obviously I'm attracted to crazy people, but there's something about the process. It's a challenge. I don't know how to do the studio movies, so for me, it's just like a new tool I'm learning how to use. There's other things coming up at the end of the year that I'm really looking forward to, there's a film called The Stanford Prison Experiment, which I think I'm going to do, with this guy call Chris Quarry who wrote Usual Suspects, who is a fucking smart guy, I think. It's the new cool, smart is the new cool.