Colin Morgan has a rule to decide whether he takes a part. "If I'm not completely daunted," he tells GQ, "I'm not interested." Reflect on the 30-year-old's recent projects and it seems to be paying off. Last year he made a splash in the Kray brothers biopic Legend. The challenge? To hold his own alongside Tom Hardy. Before that he had The Fall, in which he had to handle bedroom scenes with Gillian Anderson. And then there's sci-fi drama Humans, which required Morgan to get inside the head of a hybrid creature who has confronted death, been physically reconstructed and now lives on the fringes of humanity.
Heavy-duty roles can take their toll. In January, the Armagh-born Morgan appeared in the film The Laughing King, as a man considering suicide. Although he has played people in tough circumstances before - a blind person (Testament Of Youth), a drug addict (Parked) - he found it especially traumatic. "There was a point where I walk towards a cliff to end my life, and in that moment I understood why that was an attractive solution. It was a dark place for me."
"The enormous responsibility and protectiveness a man has to feel towards his family when they are threatened was a revelation to me," he explains. "I have now experienced manhood."
This month's outings are rather less gloomy. Not only The Huntsman: Winter's War, which marks Morgan's next foray into Hollywood (this time alongside our cover star Charlize Theron), but also BBC's The Living And The Dead, a Victorian-era supernatural drama. For Morgan, filling the shoes of a character who had lived through two marriages, raised a child and whose family is in peril was transformative. "The enormous responsibility and protectiveness a man has to feel towards his family when they are threatened was a revelation to me. I have now experienced manhood."
*The Living And The Dead *starts in June; The Huntsman: Winter's War is out now; The Fall and Humans return later in the year.
