Paddy Considine has channelled some of the most memorably troubled psyches in recent British cinema: the naive, menacing stranger in A Room for Romeo Brass; the flame-eyed, born-again zealot in My Summer of Love; the soldier stalking the inhabitants of a Midlands town in Dead Man’s Shoes.

This week he will add to that list on the small screen in the BBC Two adaptation of David Hare’s My Zinc Bed, playing a down-at-heel poet who interviews Jonathan Pryce’s corporate titan and seduces the latter’s trophy wife (Uma Thurman) after they bond over their shared alcoholism.

It’s a performance whose inner turbulence and saturnine intensity will be familiar to Considine fans. Not that he himself would agree: “To be perfectly honest, I thought that I struggled to make it convincing.”

We are sitting outside a Sheffield café, around the corner from the studio where Considine is recording an EP with his band, Riding the Low. At 34 he looks more like a rock star than an actor, with his leather jacket and ear-sweeping, Liam Gallagher haircut. And he is hugely affable company, even on his dark conversational detours. He was miscast, he says, in My Zinc Bed, whose sculpted dialogue jarred with his naturalistic instincts: “I said to Jonathan Pryce, ‘It’s not my world. I can do the emotion, but I can’t do the lines perfectly.’ ”

No such problems for Thurman, whose demeanor, he says, was anything but starry: “Oh man, she works hard. She knew every line, she applied herself and she was full of creative suggestions.” The film’s director, Anthony Page, encouraged Considine to improvise, as he had so successfully in his previous films. But, obsessed with mastering the language, he was unable to experiment as freely as he once did.

One thing he did empathise with was the theme of addiction: “I know what it’s like to have a little reckless gene inside you that makes you want to go off the edge now and then. I know what it’s like to knock the booze on the head and then all of a sudden Friday creeps around and you’re there again.”

Considine has never been an alcoholic, he insists, but “I used to think that I drank a bit too much . . .” He stops. “This is going the wrong way. I don’t have a problem, I just enjoy a brew like anyone else.” In preparation for the role he went to a few AA meetings, where he was struck by “the desperation of people who were drinking vodka the moment they woke up.”

He talks about the hypocrisy of middle-class drinkers, putting away a bottle of pinot grigio every night after work. Perhaps class is the key with My Zinc Bed, I suggest. He nods: “That’s where my Achilles’ heel was. The dialogue is written in a very middle-class way. I do struggle with that.”

The film does feel stagy, perhaps inevitably considering its theatrical origins. But Considine is far more fluent than he makes out, and there are moments of real visceral power, such as when he urges Thurman to do away with her glass and drink directly from the bottle. “I understand the bile in that,” he says. “Don’t f*** about – get it down your neck.”

Considine has talked about a “black hole” from which he draws. “I deal on a daily basis with this thing called self-doubt,” he explains. “It’s what propels me – but it’s also what tells me in the middle of a take, ‘You are s***.’ I was going to give up acting a couple of years ago. I thought I was incapable of doing it.”

Some of that insecurity undoubtedly comes from his childhood down the road in Burton-on-Trent, where he was one of six children to unemployed parents: “I don’t want to get out the little violin but there were times when we didn’t even have wall-paper. At least my mates had bog roll to wipe their arses on. We had to use – no, I don’t want to go there. I’d call it tribal at times.”

But he never got grief at school – “Because I had an old man whose shadow loomed large over the estate.” Considine Sr was “a very hard man,” he says. Not gangster hard: “It wasn’t like, ‘Here comes Reggie Kray, he’s gonna blow you legs off. It was just men and pubs and fists. He was like Lee Marvin without the film career.” But he was never violent with his own family, Considine insists, and could be “great fun”.

His father died in 2001, at the age of 59. “If I went the same time as him, that gives me not very long,” he says casually. Is he genuinely worried he’ll die before 60? “Yeah, I do have a feeling that’ll be the case. Men don’t live long, man.” Most live past 59, though. “I don’t know, mate: my father, his friends, they’re all going around 60.”

That sense of time running out has spurred him on. He is determined to be a good husband to his childhood sweetheart Shelley, and a responsible dad to his two children – a third is on the way. And last year, he directed his first film, Dog Altogether, a short starring Peter Mullan as a character based on Considine’s father: a middle-aged man plagued by violence and anger. “I needed to make sense of it all,” he says. The film won a Bafta, and he is currently developing it into a feature, again starring Mullan, who reminds him of his dad. He gets out his wallet and produces a photograph of a man in his fifties: bald, thickset, impassive. The similarity with Mullan is striking.

Also on the slate are two acting projects to be directed by his close friend Shane Meadows, including one about a bare-knuckle boxer, and a project for Channel 4 adapted from David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet novels, in which he will play a detective trailing the Yorkshire Ripper. Your characters don’t exactly exude sweetness and light, I say. “Well,” he smiles. “Who does?”

Big-name stars about to hit the small screen

Tom Wilkinson
The British star of such Hollywood fare as Batman Begins and Michael Clayton will appear on BBC Two soon in the drama A Number, playing a father confronted by the sons he had cloned a decade earlier – all played by fellow star Rhys Ifans.

Gemma Arterton
The St Trinian’s star is the latest Bond girl in Quantum of Solace, but not before appearing in the iconic role of Tess of the D’Urbervilles in BBC One’s lavish new adaptation next month.

Kenneth Branagh
Branagh’s first TV role since playing Ernest Shackleton six years ago is as Wallander in BBC One’s three films later this year based on Henning Mankell’s Swedish detective novels.

John Hurt
Will don rouge and floppy fedora to reprise his most famous role, Quentin Crisp, on ITV1 next year, in An Englishman in New York.

Jim Caviezel
The Passion of the Christ star will play Number Six opposite Ian McKellen in ITV’s remake of The Prisoner, due next year.

— My Zinc Bed, Wed, BBC Two, 9pm

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