Aaron Taylor-Johnson – "I don't feel like I need a future drawn out for me"

From Kick-Ass to Kraven the Hunter via his next big role opposite Ryan Gosling in The Fall Guy, Aaron Taylor Johnson is Britain's next big film star

- By Christina Newland. Photography by Kosmas Pavlos

VERY MUCH BY accident, Aaron Taylor-Johnson - the swaggering 33-year-old star of action movies like Bullet Train and the bookies' favourite to be the next 007 - currently has access to my unlocked iPhone. I doubt he's thinking about it, but I certainly am: a movie star is sitting across from me at a restaurant, thumbing idly through my Notes app. I was showing him something relevant to our interview, but one backwards swipe could mean access to anything from my grocery lists to, well... God knows what. And here I was thinking it was the talent who was supposed to feel exposed at an interview.

Turns out it's a two-way street, as he hands my phone back to me. "What you gotta realise," he's saying to me, "is that what most people were doing in their twenties, I was doing when I was 13." We're discussing being judged about doing things at certain ages.

You might be thinking of a certain tabloid furore over his meeting and falling in love with his wife of over 10 years, Sam Taylor-Johnson, when she directed him in her John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy. With more than two decades between them, the public derision over their marriage was widespread and cruel. "You're doing something too quickly for someone else? I don't understand that. What speed are you supposed to enjoy life at? It's bizarre to me," he says.