The night before I meet Thomas Brodie-Sangster, a friend reads his Wikipedia page to me in horror. “He’s 32!” she says. “He can’t be!” The waitress in the cafe where we meet in central London makes a similar noise when she clocks Brodie-Sangster, noting that he has barely changed since he hit the big time in 2003. When he was in his mid-20s, bars were still refusing to serve him unless he showed ID. In 2019, a viral tweet highlighted how young he looked, with an image of him alongside Keira Knightley, who is just five years older.

That film that catapulted the baby-faced actor to fame in the early 00s was, of course, Love Actually, Richard Curtis’s unapologetically schmaltzy yuletide romance. Brodie-Sangster played Sam, who learns to play the drums to impress the classmate he has a crush on, alongside the likes of Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson and Colin Firth. Brodie-Sangster was 13 at the time. Does it annoy him to still be labelled “the Love Actually kid”? He shakes his head. “If I got annoyed about it every time, I’d spend a lot of my life that way,” he says. “It’s something I’m really proud of. It’s cool to be in a film that’s somehow still gaining momentum. It did quite well but it wasn’t a huge blockbuster. But over the years it’s gained that cult following.” He watched it for the first time this year since the premiere, and says it was “pretty good, brilliant writing,” before adding with a laugh: “And great acting all round.”

Dressed in a smart blazer and checked shirt, Brodie-Sangster is a modest, thoughtful interviewee. “Tom’s always been a professional,” Thompson tells me via email. “He was fully formed at 10 … a joy to work with and an increasing wonder to watch.”

He has driven here from his Hertfordshire home to talk about a show and a role that are seemingly the polar opposite of his measured, grounded existence. In Pistol – a six-episode series based on Sex Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones’s memoir, Lonely Boy – Brodie-Sangster sports fake ginger curls as the band’s megalomaniac manager Malcolm McLaren, who shot the ragtag group of working-class men to fame, and was later described by frontman John Lydon as “the most evil man in the world”. Directed by Danny Boyle and adapted by Craig Pearce (Moulin Rouge!), it is peppered with archive footage and snarling recreations of the band’s hits. Unsurprisingly, given the clashes and conflicts the series details, it did not have the blessing of Lydon, who called it “disrespectful” and unsuccessfully went to court to stop his former bandmates licensing the rights to their music.

Early reactions to the series, based on the trailer, have focused on the lack of physical resemblance between the cast and their characters – notably Anson Boon as Lydon, and Brodie-Sangster as McLaren. Creative licence aside, it is surprisingly good and gritty, and will appeal to those who lived through the 70s as much as those experiencing the birth of punk for the first time. In any case, Brodie-Sangster was keen not to make his Malcolm a caricature. “This series is full of such mad, over the top characters,” he says. “One of the key things was to make it still believable. I didn’t want to do an impression.”

Brodie-Sangster is, of course, far too young to have experienced the Pistols first-hand. Born in south London more than a decade after their heyday, he was 10 when his actor parents sent off his headshots to friends who were starting a talent agency. This led to his first audition, for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. He has previously described his “anger and frustration” at not landing the role of Ron Weasley; today he says stoically that he “never really regrets any decision that happens … 90% of the time you don’t get the role, so you have to find a way of being OK with it.”

Alongside Love Actually and the children’s fantasy film Nanny McPhee – working with Thompson again – he appeared in a CBBC series, Feather Boy, the name his classmates would shout at him in the corridors of his state school in Pimlico. He didn’t encounter much jealousy, he says, and when he did, he shrugged it off. “What happened in school didn’t really affect me,” he says. “Because I was thinking, I’ll probably get another job and bugger off.” He has been working almost continuously ever since, including voice acting in the US animation Phineas and Ferb, playing a young Paul McCartney in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Nowhere Boy, and appearing as swaggering chess prodigy Benny Watts in the Netflix hit The Queen’s Gambit, for which he was nominated for an Emmy award for best supporting actor in a limited series. He also appeared in the teen film franchise Maze Runner, and had a small role in series three and four of Game of Thrones as Jojen Reed, who helped Bran Stark harness his ability to see into the past, present and future.

The latter two projects brought him into close contact with the young and largely female “stans” who continue to follow him around the internet. “I thought after a couple of years they would grow up and something else would replace me,” he says. Fandom and standom, he adds, can be great, unless it gets to “an unhealthy level – with obsession around celebrity culture, idolising people for not doing anything at all”. Is it unhealthy that someone has listed a candle for sale on Etsy that claims to smell of him? (Scent notes include lavender, citrus and vetiver). He laughs. “Very healthy. I don’t know where they got eau de Thomas from. I’ve seen bedsheets with me on them, too,” he says.

Before The Queen’s Gambit, he took a two-year break from acting. “There was nothing else I wanted to do day in, day out,” he says. “I just fancied slowing down for a bit, figuring out how to move forward. I didn’t want acting to become a habit.” He wasn’t too worried about being forgotten in the meantime. “If that happens, that happens. I’ll find something else to do,” he says. “But it could definitely happen. People get forgotten and things move on; cultures change in the film industry.”

When The Queen’s Gambit aired in late 2020 it became Netflix’s biggest ever hit and one of the most talked-about shows on TV. Sales of chess sets in the US jumped by a reported 87%. Brodie-Sangster was as surprised as anyone. “I don’t think anyone would have said that a show about chess would have the legs that it did,” he says. “That’s why it went to Netflix – it was supposed to be a film but no one wanted to make it. It’s chess. No one is gonna go and watch that. Eventually they said: ‘OK, we’ll do it, but make it a series.’” He is in awe of Anya Taylor-Joy, who starred as troubled prodigy Beth Harmon. “It was a hard job for her, going across different time periods, and she is in every scene. But she was strong – ploughing through it with no signs of weakness. Though I’m sure she needed a break afterwards.”

Chess was a world Brodie-Sangster knew a little about; 70s punk, not so much. When he thought of the designer Vivienne Westwood, who was in a relationship with McLaren during the Pistols era, had a son with him and ran the boutique SEX with him in London’s Chelsea, he thought of “Edwardian puffy dresses, billowing fabrics and stuff. I didn’t know that she was behind the punk movement.” As for McLaren, even after some research, it was hard to work out precisely who he was. “I watched videos of him: sometimes he would sound American, sometimes he had this very proper British accent and other times he sounded quite London,” says Brodie-Sangster. “There were lots of mannerisms [to study] as well, and how he held his mouth. His pitch would go all over the place; his hands would come out quite a lot. There were all these details. It’s like creating a book in my head of all these things, and then trying to pull them all together and do it justice.”

If McLaren were still alive, what would he ask him? “Where’s the [Sex Pistols’] money!” he laughs. “I’d ask him about his background and his childhood. What led him to want to wake England up, to destroy things to get a reaction? And I’d want to know how he felt about the boys? How much he felt he needed to look after them or whether that was all an act? I’m not sure whether he’d give me a straight answer to any of those”. He’s fascinated, too, by what McLaren did next – wacky ideas such as his 1983 single, Double Dutch, featuring a New York skipping troupe, The Ebonettes, an album of opera adaptations, and a foray into hip-hop in the US. “I’d say he was a real genius – and perhaps a bit of an arsehole.”

While Malcolm gets plenty of funny quips, he’s frequently shown in acid-tongued “arsehole” mode towards the band and Vivienne (played by Talulah Riley), at one point referring to her as “the girl that does the sewing”. (“That one’s meant to bleed,” says Brodie-Sangster.) What was it like to direct his more cutting remarks towards Riley – St Trinian’s star, ex-wife of Elon Musk and now Brodie-Sangster’s girlfriend? “I wasn’t dating her at the time,” he says. Riley recently said that the pair “hadn’t really acknowledged each other as a romantic possibility until the moment that we both did”. Despite their challenging relationship on-screen, things are going well off it. “Thankfully we’re not too much like Viv and Malc,” he says, before gently steering the conversation back to their other co-stars.

The series is darker than some viewers might expect. Jones’s memoir told of the sexual abuse he had suffered at the hands of his stepfather, and the show details the painful flashbacks and hypersexualisation caused by his trauma. We also see the effects of drugs on the band, who lost bassist Sid Vicious to an overdose in 1979. “A writer who lived through the period asked Danny [Boyle] about how dark the series would be,” Brodie-Sangster says. “They said something like: ‘Glamorising the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll of the Sex Pistols – the most out there, ridiculous, angry band that there was at the time – without diving into the darkness, wouldn’t make for a well-rounded show.’ Danny was like: ‘No, don’t worry – it comes.’ And it does come. You realise that they’re just lost little boys. They’re young and angry, and you understand where that hurt comes from, why they’re screaming. It’s like John Lennon or Kurt Cobain. I think, in particular, Jonesy [as Jones is referred to in the series] is that way. I think Danny wanted to show the fragility of these angry, strong spit-in-your-face guys, a fragility to their outlandish masculinity.”

While the cast and crew hoped to make the show authentic, there was space, too, for what Brodie-Sangster describes as “a weirdness that’s so Danny Boyle. He’s up for anything. There are these little moments that pull you out of reality and you go: ‘Woah!’ There’s a scene where Jonesy [played by Toby Wallace] and Chrissie Hynde [Sydney Chandler] sing David Bowie’s Starman, and then suddenly a mirror ball comes down. You think: ‘Is that gonna be a bit cheesy?’ But actually we enter their vision of what they want from stardom, and it’s brilliant.”

For all of its arty touches, Pistol does well to centre the music, with the actors learning their instruments largely from scratch to provide the show’s soundtrack. And there’s a pleasingly devil-may-care feel to the performances. Maisie Williams is particularly insouciant as punk icon Jordan – AKA Pamela Rooke – whom she tracked down while preparing for the part. Rooke ended up advising the show’s makeup artist about the techniques she had used. “It’s such a shame she died before it came out,” says Brodie-Sangster. “Maisie said that she was lovely.”

What next for Brodie-Sangster? Netflix subscribers will soon see him fronting two episodes of Voices of Liberation, an ambitious documentary series about the second world war. There’s a personal connection in the form of his family history. “My great-grandfather was in the secret service, and my great-grandmother housed members of the French resistance in Sussex,” he says. “They flew in by moonlight, and once they’d received training and documents they would secretly fly back to France. She would sew cyanide capsules into their cuffs and all kinds of madness.” He’s looking forward to telling the rest of this dramatic story, and to seeing what viewers make of Pistol. “And I should probably get another job”, he says. He may forever be “the Love Actually kid”, but that won’t pay the bills.

Pistol airs on Disney+ in the UK and Australia and FX on Hulu in the US from 31 May.

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