Toby Kebbell on Wrath of the Titans He talks about watching "Stallone and Arnie and those guys, when they were making millions and millions," and how a lot of the films stand up pretty well, and how it's the good ones that tend to pan out best financially. When you're doing it for money first, it's not great. The underlying intention is, I'd like to make money enough to look after my mum, to look after my brothers and my sister, and then for myself. His childhood has a Hardy-esque ring to it, with Kebbell, his three older brothers and a younger half-sister all stuffed into a couple of bedrooms. Friends died from stabbings in Nottingham during his teens, before acting workshops at Central TV paid off with his breakthrough audition for Meadows in 2004. His yen to go back there has diminished over the years. When I first moved to London I felt very homesick, and yearned after the countryside a lot. Because London's hard. It's a big place and it's lonely. It takes a while to get into it. But once I got into the flow of it and started to grow up, I realised that my home is wherever I am. In between the popcorn gigs, Kebbell has hardly sat idle. He's one of the best things in Anton Corbijn's Control (2007) as Joy Division manager Rob Gretton; far and away the best thing in Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla (2008) as the mesmeric crackhead Johnny Quid, whom he plays as a sort of mocking fallen angel; and thoroughly in charge of The Veteran (2011), in his first bona fide leading role as a traumatised soldier back from Afghanistan. Most recently, you'd probably recognise him as the hero who rescues the horse from no-man's-land in Spielberg's War Horse. Still, I think that his best work yet is for television, in the outstanding third episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror trilogy. He had to audition three times for this - executives kept pushing for someone "less macho" to make the theme of obsessive sexual jealousy more persuasive, but he fought his corner, arguing that alpha-male-types aren't neurosis-free, and is horrifyingly convincing in it. With each new movie, Kebbell seems to inch a bit closer to his professional holy grail: call it searching for Withnail. He's watched Bruce Robinson's cult classic repeatedly and it's clear that Richard E Grant's performance is a benchmark for what he'd like to achieve in movies. "Every touch of what he does is perfect," he says. Kebbell's confidence in his own talents comes across strongly, but it feels so intuitive that you can't call it immodest. He has a story about being on the Alexander set, where his one scene involved turning up, delivering a speech to Val Kilmer's Philip, kissing him, spitting on him, and then killing him. I went over to Val, who had his feet up on the make-up table getting the prosthetics on his eye done. I said I couldn't see why I would need to tell Philip all this information, when what's written on my face says the same thing. He looked at me and said, 'Have I ever shown you my house in New Mexico?" and I was like, 'Um, no, given that this is the second time we've ever met." So he got his laptop and started showing me pictures of this beautiful house, which I took to mean, 'Cutting the lines is not open for discussion. The next day I turned up on set and Oliver said, 'Val told me your idea. I think it's great! So Val had gone ahead and relayed it to the big man on my behalf. I don't know many other actors who would want to cut out their one speech in an Oliver Stone film. Neither do I. This is fighting talk and there's nothing vain about it. Wrath of the Titans (12A) is out now