Sam Riley: ‘How naked can you have a man in a Disney film?’

Sam Riley is sitting in the one corner of an otherwise sunny hotel suite that the light hasn’t been able to reach. “I managed to find my way into the shadows!” the 39-year-old says in a soft Yorkshire timbre, nodding to his on-screen affinity for the dark and the tortured. “My grandfather never understood why I wasn’t doing comedies. I’m not particularly tragic. I’m quite a positive person generally speaking, and I enjoy being daft. But the first time anyone saw me was in Control, and I think that’s stayed with people.”

It is true that it was Riley’s uncanny turn as the suicidal Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis that made him a star, but a similar dark energy has underpinned his roles in the 12 years since. He was the wide-eyed sociopath Pinkie Brown in the 2010 rework of Brighton Rock, an aloof and haunted Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, as well as the crown prince of self-destructive moodiness, Jack Kerouac, or at least his fictional alter-ego Sal Paradise, in the 2012 adaptation of On the Road. “I do have a sad-looking face as well,” Riley confesses.

It’s something of a surprise then that Riley’s most eye-catching role since Control has been as a bumbling, nefarious minion to Angelina Jolie in Disney’s 2014 hit Maleficent. The sequel, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, is released this week. “I’m really happy to be in something people might actually watch at some point,” Riley deadpans, a mischievous smile exposing a row of messy teeth. Playing Maleficent’s loyal devotee Diaval – originally a raven called Diablo in Disney’s 1959 animated classic Sleeping Beauty but transformed into a man for the live-action films – Riley is the franchise’s secret weapon: the manic, grovelling antidote to Jolie’s deliciously vampy haughtiness.

Jolie was instrumental in Riley’s casting – she and former husband Brad Pitt were reportedly huge fans of his work in Control – though Riley explains that it still takes him by surprise when he finds himself on set, being silly alongside one of Hollywood’s biggest names as she cackles beneath two enormous horns. “I didn’t think I was particularly Disney material,” he says. And despite Jolie always introducing herself to co-workers as “Angie”, Riley still refers to her as “Angelina” in conversation.

“It’s probably the northerner in me,” he says, before breaking into a cartoonishly shrill version of his Yorkshire accent. “I’m just waiting for someone to go: ‘Ooh, is it Anjehh now?’” He says that of all the famous people he has worked with, Jolie is the one his friends and family are most fascinated by. “That’s mega-stardom, isn’t it?”

Being part of a blockbuster film, he says, took some getting used to, particularly when it came to decisions about his character. “With Disney things, a lot of people have to tick off on certain aspects,” he explains. “I’m not in Johnny Depp’s position where [I can say], ‘I think the raven should be drunk!’ Every look that we tried, and there were hundreds of looks, had to be okayed by hundreds of people.”

In the first film, he says “the upper echelons” at Disney were riddled with nerves over the scene in which Maleficent turns Diaval from a raven into a man, and whether the scene called for nudity. “How naked can you have a man in a Disney film?” Riley remembers asking. In the end, he was supplied with a plastic breastplate, complete with six-pack, and some strategically placed mud to cover his modesty for the scene in question. “It was the best I’d ever looked,” he jokes. For the sequel, he was “thrilled” to remain fully clothed. “I even did up all the buttons on my shirt this time.”

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is a looser and more sprawling fantasy epic in comparison to its predecessor, with a plot that strands many of the first film’s cast in separate adventures. Aurora (Elle Fanning) is engaged to be married to Prince Philip (Harris Dickinson); the shifty Queen Ingrith (franchise newcomer Michelle Pfeiffer, every bit Jolie’s camp equal) is plotting a coup; while Maleficent is off delving into her ancestry, encountering a possible link to her past in the form of a warrior played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. Diaval has less to do than before, but Riley doesn’t seem too bothered. “There’s so many times when you put all the work in and nobody cares, or nobody sees it and it disappears,” he explains. “After the experiences I’ve had in this business, I sort of limit my expectations.”

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Riley trained at the National Youth Theatre as a teenager, but was pulled towards music as he reached his twenties. He says today, however, that his musical aspirations produced “limited success”. 10,000 Things, the band he once fronted, were signed to Polydor in 2003 and were a riotous footnote to the “indie landfill” era, The Guardian declaring their only album “an overproduced and overlong mess”. After they were dropped by the label, he returned to acting, making a living from a series of odd jobs until he attended an open audition for Control. He would meet his future wife, the actor Alexandra Maria Lara (who played Curtis’s Belgian lover, journalist Annik Honoré), while working on it, and seemed set for major stardom.

Assisted by a number of accolades for his performance, including a Bafta nomination, he was declared one of the major “next big things” in UK acting. What followed was a somewhat standard publicity cycle: the modelling contract with Burberry, a few American star vehicles, the rumours that he was going to succeed Daniel Craig as James Bond. But then it all seemed to stagnate.

Outside of his work with the acclaimed British filmmaker Ben Wheatley, including the action thriller Free Fire and the forthcoming Netflix adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Riley has often wound up in projects that fared poorly with critics and audiences – the little-seen BBC spy drama SS-GB, the maligned Marie Curie biopic Radioactive, the latter-day Harvey Weinstein flop Suite Française. The Maleficent franchise is probably one of the few projects a large number of people would have seen him in since Control.

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Riley is open about the fact that his career took a turn away from what many expected it to be, and quick to be self-deprecating. “I think it was mutual on the part of the film industry and me, a slight reticence and suspicion,” he confides. “The closer I ever got to being famous, the more I was a bit panicked by it and pulled away from it.”

It began early. 13, a 2010 action thriller that should have been his big American debut, took years to see the light of day. Riley only discovered it was out in the world when he was visiting his parents back home in Yorkshire and a man carrying a basket of knock-off DVDs offered to sell him a copy of it. “I bought it, obviously, and watched my big American breakthrough on a pirate DVD,” Riley cracks. He still owns it.

Even while filming On the Road in 2010, alongside the likes of Kristen Stewart and Amy Adams, Riley felt out of place. He remembers a friend of Jack Kerouac visiting the set and embracing his co-star Garrett Hedlund with open arms, crying “Oh my god, he’s Neal Cassady personified!”, only to react with vague horror when he learnt that Kerouac was being played by, in his words, an “awful tall” Brit. The film’s director, Walter Salles, was in earshot at the time. “I’m not sure if that panicked him slightly,” Riley says.

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He’s not bitter, however. He’s been based in Berlin, where Lara grew up, since Control, the pair raising their five-year-old son and taking turns working on film sets and taking care of the home.

“We want to have a life with each other,” he explains. “The most important thing to the two of us is that we are at home as much as we can be, and with our boy.”

And if Ian Curtis is the one thing he is ever remembered for, he’s fine with it. “When me and my wife were in Cannes [in 2007], we were looking down from the roof of the cinema and people were queuing around the block,” he remembers. “It wasn’t really getting a single bad write-up, and I wasn’t [either]. There are actors who go their whole careers without a moment like that. Great actors. I’m thrilled that I had Control, and whether that could ever be reached again – it’s unlikely, isn’t it? You’re only gonna get a role like that maybe two or three times in a career if you’re lucky. I just want to be an actor that works… who can keep getting away with it.”

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is in UK cinemas on Friday