Sam Riley never grows tired of receiving accolades. The 28-year-old star of last year’s indie smash Control has already won Best Actor at both the Chicago and Edinburgh Film Festivals and the Most Promising Newcomer trophy at the British Independent Film Awards, and the Breakthrough of the Year gong at LA’s Hollywood Life awards.

To this he can add nominations for the Times/South Bank Show Breakthrough Award and the Orange Rising Star Award, the winner of which will be announced at the Baftas on February 10. (The other nominees are Shia LaBoeuf, Sienna Miller, Ellen Page and Tang Wei.)

“I said that I never tire of it, and I’m grateful for it and the hype it creates,” explains the sometime singer and former frontman of the Leeds band 10,000 Things. “But that doesn’t mean I’m about to start believing it all.”

Riley, a striking assemblage of cheekbones, jawbones and sad, soul-ful eyes, delivered such a devastating debut turn as Control’s troubled protagonist Ian Curtis that it somehow elevated the entire movie beyond mere musical hagiography and into human tragedy. His character’s progression from optimistic Manchester moppet to lead singer with the band Joy Division to shattered, soul-destroyed suicide is both seductive and terrifying.

He says that the role changed his life, and continues to redefine it. He now, for instance, lives in the Char-lottenburg district of Berlin with the actress Alexandra Maria Lara ( Downfall), his co-star in Control (“I’m such a cliché, but it was instant attraction for me,” he says).

Riley says he’s acutely aware of how he has suddenly leapt up the acting food chain the easy way, without much so-called “hard slaving”. As a result he’s constantly worried that the stream of awards and media publicity may leave him a tad overexposed. “It’s a double-edged issue,” he says. “You need to be seen and written about for your film to do well, but at the same time there’s a risk that it’ll be, like: ‘Oh no, not that t*** again, reeling out the same old stories! How he worked in a factory, how he did that dance – we all know the stories by now.’ ” The stories, of course, usually begin with Riley in late 2005, at his lowest ebb. His band, which had once ridden the wave of popular enthusiasm for Leeds-based rock (see also the Kaiser Chiefs and the Cribs), have been dropped by their record label Polydor, and Riley has been working in a warehouse (not a factory), folding T-shirts. He remembers that he once acted in the National Youth Theatre as a teen-ager, and that he had an agent, too. “So I rung this woman up and said: ‘Do you remember me?’ And she said: ‘Yes.’ And they just happened to be looking for an Ian for Control the following Wednesday.”

After three auditions Riley finds himself in front of Control’s director, the Dutch rock photographer Anton Corbijn, whose inky monochrome pop videos fill the back catalogues of everyone from U2 to the Killers, Coldplay and beyond. Riley has been practising Curtis’s trade-mark dance (speed-walking on the spot meets electro-shock therapy) by watching a bootlegged Joy Division DVD. He performs it for Corbijn, and is hired on January 8, 2006 (his birthday – and that of Elvis and David Bowie too, he notes, with mock grandeur).

He soon finds himself on set, acting opposite Samantha Morton playing Curtis’s wife, Deborah, and Lara, as Curtis’s lover, the Belgian journalist Annik Honoré. “Sometimes I’d pinch myself and think: ‘Hang on a minute. I was doing f***-all three weeks ago, and now I’m the lead in a black and white movie, playing opposite two top actresses, smoking, not really saying much, and singing – this is pretty cool!’ ” It isn’t, however, until the film’s barnstorming reception at the Cannes Film Festival of 2007 that the penny finally drops for Riley about the enormity of his situation. “I was stood on the roof terrace of this hotel on the Croisette,” he says. “And I saw people queuing around the block for the press screening of the film. And they were being turned away. Right then I thought: ‘Something could be up here!’ ” Riley says that, on reflection, his dramatic trip to movie stardom has a certain perverse logic to it. As a child – the eldest of four born to a nursery teacher mum and textile worker dad – he had a near-Method obsession with movies; he spent two full weeks in tea-towels and sheets after seeing Lawrence of Arabia. In school he was drawn to drama, and eventually to the National Youth Theatre. He says his early acting career was sidetracked by his rock ambitions only when it seemed that his roles – bit parts in TV cop dramas such as Lenny Blue – were beginning to damage, to him at least, his credibility as a creative tyro.

He remains extremely fussy about his work, and since Control has made only one movie, the dystopian sci-fi flick Franklyn. “I’ve had offers, crazy offers, more money than I’ve ever been used to, or come close to, but even though it’s tempting I just want to wait.” What type of offers? Romantic comedies? “There were a couple of those,” he says. “But that’s not really me. I don’t think a streak of p*** with a smoker’s cough is going to make Hugh Grant lose any sleep.”

Right now, though, he says that he’s just content to work on his debut screenplay (a postapocalyptic western set in Yorkshire), and to enjoy being “loved up” and living in Berlin, where daily life consists of big breakfasts, regular strolls down the Ku’damm and lazy afternoons watching The Simpsons in German.

But what about the future? When the cash runs out will he end up taking the hefty pay cheque and trying to balance big-budget projects with smaller indie concerns? “I know that’s what they say, isn’t it? You do one for them and one for yourself,” he says. “And maybe that will happen eventually. But at the moment I’m just in it for myself. Selfish bastard that I am.”

— Vote for the Orange Rising Star award at orange.co.uk/bafta

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