Jack Scanlon and Asa Butterfield are the pre-teen double act at the heart of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The actors, aged 10 and 11 respectively, give two eerily compelling turns as the Jewish Shmuel (Scanlon) and the German Bruno (Butterfield), boys who form an unlikely friendship from, literally, opposite sides of the fence (the barbed wire perimeter of a concentration camp). It’s through this friendship that we witness the perversity of the Holocaust anew, where sheer barbarity slams up against childhood innocence.

“They kept us away from most of the bad stuff,” says Butterfield, sitting next to Scanlon on a huge sofa in a London hotel room, and explaining how the boys, in order to preserve their on-camera innocence, were shielded from the mocked-up atrocities around them on the film’s Budapest set. “There were some bad days, like when Kotler [Rupert Friend] had to shout at us,” Scanlon adds. “But the minute the scene was over he was Rupert again – we call him Rupert The Friend!”

Scanlon, from Kent, who auditioned for the movie through his local drama club, says that the darkness of the film only hit home in the final brutal concentration camp scenes. Butterfield, from Islington, North London, who has been attending drama classes since he was 7, agrees. “It was disgusting,” he says, recalling how they were crammed together with hundreds of Hungarian extras for scenes of extreme degradation. Even then, however, once the director Mark Herman yelled “Cut”, the boys had no time to wallow – they had three hours of school lessons to do every day, with an onset tutor.

Both boys admit that the experience has taught them a lot about the Holocaust and the film business. They both regard acting as a hobby, and neither of them come from thespish families – Butterfield’s mother is a teacher, Scanlon’s father works for Ernst & Young – but now the possibility of a film career is staring them firmly in the face. “I don’t really want to be an actor,” says Butterfield, who nonetheless has snagged another role, opposite Anthony Hopkins in the upcoming horror The Wolf Man. Scanlon is more enthusiastic about the prospect, but with one proviso – “As long as acting stays fun, I’ll keep doing it. Because, um, we’re all about the fun at this age.”

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