Craig Roberts: the Richard Ayoade protege turned debonair director

Craig Roberts waits for me by the entrance of Cardiff Central railway station. Wales’ wannabe David Lynch, a purveyor of dark tales from the valleys, is dressed in black, hair slicked back, lost in thought as he draws on a cigarette.

It’s a little ironic to see Roberts looking so cool. Since starring in Richard Ayoade’s Submarine, the 24-year-old actor – and now feature film director – has made a career playing the adolescent weirdo stuck in a world of his own. On the strength of his directorial debut, Just Jim, it’s a persona, it seems, he is happy to embrace.

“Let’s get a coffee,” he says. “I need one, I haven’t really been sleeping recently.” You can sort of tell. It’s startling, for anyone who has seen Submarine, how quickly Roberts has grown up. The big eyes and round, puppyish face have been replaced by sheer cheekbones, the facial hair of a Johnny Depp fan, and the baggy eyes of a genuine somnambulist.

And for a good reason. At the end of this week, Roberts’s first film as director is getting a major cinema release. Shot on a budget of £300,000, Just Jim is set in Roberts’s home-town of Maesycwmmer – “Two shops, no one’s out on the streets, they all stay inside,” – based on a script he wrote late at night in a hotel in Los Angeles during a three-month stint as he performed in his first Hollywood movie, Bad Neighbours, with Seth Rogen and Zac Efron (his character was called “Assjuice”).

Roberts calls Just Jim a “coming-of-age noir”, set among the community that has shaped him; a place, he says, where “the people look miserable but sound happy”.

After returning home from LA, Roberts submitted the script to the Film Agency for Wales, which gave the green light. He then assembled himself a crew of more than 30 people, working his contacts in Hollywood to convince the starry US actor Emile Hirsch to come on board.

What drove him to such an undertaking in this early part of his career? “I wanted to tell a certain type of story,” he says. “And I realised, if you direct something, it’s yours. You have ownership over that creation. That was a very seductive thought.”

Just Jim, he says, is a personal film, and in more ways than one. The story tells of what happens when Roberts’s Jim – whose life revolves around his Nintendo and the same old noir films in his local cinema – comes into contact with Hirsch’s suave American, Dean, who improbably moves in as Jim’s next-door neighbour. Jim’s habits are Roberts’s habits and during the shoot, the producers bunked in his grandma’s house. “They managed to kill her fish,” Roberts says, “which she seems to care about more than the fact I made a film.” His best friend and now former girlfriend have supporting roles. Pupils from the local school helped direct the behind-the-scenes features.

After wandering for a while around the centre of Cardiff, we get a train deep into the hills for a tour of Maesycwmmer where Roberts shares anecdotes of valley life. “All the characters are based on people I knew growing up here,” he says. “My attempts to get with girls weren’t very successful.” He points out a faded cafe. “That used to be a barbers run by a guy called Bill,” he says. “Bill started going blind, but didn’t tell anyone. They had to close him down in the end.” When we get near to his old school, he recalls the only time he got into a playground fight. He tried to headbutt an opponent, only to miss his target and make contact with the bully’s chest. “They were all like: ‘What the fuck was that move?’ before pissing themselves laughing.”

As we talk, he slips into impersonations of his mentor Ayoade, of Quentin Tarantino, and at one point, starts to rap along to Eminem. Roberts carries an autobiography of the rapper whenever he goes. “He just has an ability to not give a fuck,” Roberts says, admiringly. “I think we can all aspire to that.”

Roberts sees Just Jim as a homecoming. Although he has been acting since the age of nine, he’s been working relentlessly since Ayoade, who helped edit this film, picked him out from more than 100 people at a Submarine audition. Up until that point, Roberts’s biggest roles had been in Casualty and the CBBC kids drama Young Dracula. Suddenly, at the age of 18, he was a big deal, winning the young British performer of the year at the Critics’ Circle awards in 2012. Since then, Roberts’s wide-eyed expression – like he’s just seen a ghost – coupled with his dry-as-dust delivery, has become a currency. Roles in British indies such as Ayoade’s follow-up to Submarine, The Double, and Simon Aboud’s Comes A Bright Day were coupled with blockbusters such as 22 Jump Street with Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill.

As he recounts these experiences, Roberts remains fastidiously self-deprecating, constantly downplaying the achievement of creating a feature film at his age, and dismissing any chance that it might in any way be successful. “If anyone, anyone at all, sees the film, that will make me happy.”

But Just Jim has taken its toll. He parted ways with his girlfriend only recently. The relationship, he says, suffered as he became “fixated” on the film. The fact she was also playing his sister can’t have helped, either.

Throughout the afternoon, I’m sometimes uncertain whether I’m standing next to Roberts or Jim. Although he claims he was once spotted by fans in Ten Feet Tall, Cardiff’s indie nightclub, he also insists he never goes out, spending all his money on old movies and computer games. “That’s really all I need,” he says. In fact, he declares his love for his Xbox again and again, and says he was once so addicted to computer games and Red Bull that he had to go to his GP with an irregular heartbeat. He recalls the first time he went to Los Angeles. He was 20, just a few months after Submarine had been released. He hadn’t, at that point, lived anywhere but his family home. He found himself alone in some shady Los Angeles hotel, with naked women wandering the halls; the hotel was a location for porn shoots.

“They definitely didn’t get my sense of humour,” he says of the early meetings he had in LA. “I found it so difficult to say: ‘Hey, I’m great. Hire me!’ But that’s sort of how it works out there.”

He obviously didn’t cock it up as much as he makes out. Roberts now spends as much time in London (where he has a flat in Mile End) and in the States as he does in Maesycwmmer. Other upcoming roles will see him in Britpop-era black comedy Kill Your Friends and as the lead in Red Oaks, an Amazon Prime series directed by David Gordon Green and produced by Steven Soderbergh.

He still prefers Wales to life in Los Angeles, he says, pulling a face when I ask about the jamboree that follows celebrities such as Selena Gomez, with whom he stars in the forthcoming The Revised Fundamentals Of Caregiving. “I can get myself a coffee. I can sort myself some lunch,” he says, rolling his eyes at the demands of some of his fellow actors.

So what does he want, I ask. If I could give him the option, director or actor, which would he choose? “I just want to carry on working,” he says, the stock response for a young actor. But then he mentions the next feature he is helming, already deep in pre-production, and the tone shifts. “It’s about my auntie, who has schizophrenia,” he says. “I grew up with her, in this town, and she’s played a very important part in my life.” We’re in his local pub at this point. He takes a sip of his drink and looks out over the valleys, feeling the sun on his face.

“I do want to carry on making films,” he says, “and, to be honest, I want to carry on making them here.”

Just Jim is in cinemas from Friday 25 September