'If you can evoke a reaction like that with an audience, then that's a win in my eyes'

Archie Madekwe, named one of 'Hollywood's hottest young stars', plays a stalked musician in the eerie thriller ‘Lurker'. He talks to Tom Murray about the perils of nascent celebrity

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Before starring in Lurker, a thriller about the parasocial relationship between a rising pop star and a superfan, Archie Madekwe had a real-life lurker of his own. He was sitting in a coffee shop in LA one day, unaware that someone was watching him through the window. Alex Russell, the writer and first-time director behind the film, was sizing him up. "He just kind of watched me for a bit," Madekwe tells me, now back in his native London. It was in this voyeuristic moment that he says the filmmaker was hit with the realisation: "I think he could play Oliver." Oliver is the mononym adopted by Madekwe's charismatic British singer in the film, who lives in the Hollywood Hills with his entourage of hangers-on ("Trying to pass my friends off as professionals, man," he laments in one early scene). A chance encounter brings him face to face with Matthew, played with reptilian precision by Théodore Pellerin, who poses as a casual acquaintance to ingratiate himself into Oliver's orbit.

Madekwe, who's six foot five and moonlights as a model for brands like Loewe, initially auditioned to play Matthew. It was "so scary y and really intimidating" to instead be cast as the uberconfident musician, Madekwe tells me. "It feels a lot easier, or at least fills me with more confidence, to play somebody that's more introverted, that's recoiling," he says, drawing his arms into his chest.