Jack O’Connell, the firebrand actor, is “just waiting in me trailer, doing f--- all” when I phone him. He is in Italy, on the set of his latest film, Michael Mann’s big-budget Enzo Ferrari biopic. Even so, “I probably see myself as an outsider now more than ever,” he tells me. “There’s a certain expectation of how you’re supposed to sound, how you’re supposed to talk, all of these kinds of super­ficial qualities, which I cannot find myself wanting to conform to.”

In Ferrari, O’Connell plays the tragic 1950s British motor-racing driver Peter Collins. He is having fun working with Heat director Mann and Star Wars’s Adam Driver – “true thoroughbreds,” he says – but getting in the terrifyingly fast and dangerous grand-prix cars of the era has been “harrowing”. The tiny, bullet-shaped machines, painstakingly recreated for the film, have been equipped with V8 engines.

“I dread to think what they’d be like with a V12,” says O’Connell, sounding aghast. So, he’s not a speed freak? “Not really. I wouldn’t count myself as a petrolhead.” I always imagined him growing up in Derby riding a motorbike… He laughs. “Nah, just pedal power.”

O’Connell has roared across screen and stage in a series of scorching performances over the past decade, from a British soldier trying to stay alive in Republican Belfast in ’71 (2014) to the tormented alcoholic Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, stripping naked opposite Sienna Miller in the West End in 2017, to a disgraced army surgeon who climbs inside a slaughtered bear in last year’s Arctic-set television drama The North Water.

“Sometimes when he’s acting, he’s just a raw open wound, and you really feel for him,” House of the Dragon star Olivia Cooke told me when she appeared with O’Connell in the thought-provoking sci-fi Little Fish, in 2020; Miller said he reminded her of Brando in the “rawness and honesty” of his acting. O’Connell’s performances gnaw at the edges of male pride, fierceness and vulnerability.

The 32-year-old goes full-frontal again in a new Netflix adaptation of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as the gamekeeper with whom a baronet’s wife, played by The Crown’s Emma Corrin, experiences a sexual awakening. It’s sure to attract headlines for being a bonk-fest, but, says O’Connell, the most important thing about the sex “is you want to know that it is going to be purposeful and actually driving the story. If it’s just there for the sake of it, then you’re in trouble. There was no shock element to it, it was just trying to delve into the intimacy.” The sex scenes were shot with the help of the intimacy co-ordinator who worked on Normal People, Ita O’Brien. “There is obviously an element of trust that’s required,” O’Connell adds.

Being nude on screen was still a challenge, especially in a scene in which O’Connell and Corrin frolic in the rain, dancing with a wild freedom. How easy is it to capture the unselfconsciousness of a moment like that? “Well, if you could bottle that and sell it, anyone who bought it would know how to be an actor,” he says. “Obviously, I’m not immune to feeling self-conscious. Especially when you’re standing there with the whole show hanging out, and the entire crew looking at you expectantly, and a camera. The first take is always going to be the one that you hope nobody sees, unless some sort of miracle happens. But by the time you’re doing it for the third time, obviously you know the lay of the land a little bit better. That can sometimes be very freeing.”

In the novel, the gamekeeper can be disdainful of women; in the new series, he is tender, and reads James Joyce. Was the intention to soften him for today’s viewers? “It definitely wasn’t a conscious decision of mine,” O’Connell says. “When I read the novel, what was apparent to me was that he was very layered, he was capable of being what was required of him, how society wanted him to be. And then there was who he was in his more private moments, which did seem to me to be the more genuine version… one who was capable of real sensitivity.”

Questions of how to portray ­masculinity have swirled around O’Connell since his first screen appearance, as a boy accused of rape in The Bill in 2005. A year later, aged 15, he played a young skinhead opposite Stephen Graham and Vicky McClure in Shane Meadows’s This Is ­England (2006). Booted and ­spitting in a concrete underpass, his character is introduced with a word of caution: “That’s Pukey, he’s a bit of a nutcase, don’t wind him up.”

He became a star in Skins, Channel 4’s influential teen drama, playing the reckless, angry Cook. Did he feel the need to live up to that bad-boy-with-a heart image in real life?

“The lines got a bit blurry,” he admits. Cook wasn’t so far from his own personality, but probably also contributed to “the kind of persona that you’re building for yourself at such a young, impressionable age”. O’Connell developed a playboy reputation and was romantically linked with his Skins co-star Kaya Sco­del­ario, and later with the model Cara Delevingne. These days, “I’m going steady,” he says, sounding happy, but not venturing anything further.

He has no regrets, though. And it gave him a powerful insight into his latest role, playing the British & Irish Lions rugby player and inveterate bar brawler Robert “Paddy” Mayne in SAS Rogue Heroes, ­Steven Knight’s first big series since Peaky Blinders, based on Ben Macintyre’s book about the early days of the special-forces unit in the Second World War. Mayne, he tells me, was “a man who went to war, it was required of him to be violent. These are the lads that society probably does want to lock up in peacetime. But when it comes to situations of conflict, they’re your heroes.”

The series depicts a daring early raid on Tamet air base in the Libyan desert (filmed on location in Morocco), in which tens of Axis planes were destroyed and their pilots gunned down in the officers’ mess. It earned Mayne a reputation for bravery but also cold-bloodedness, which stood out even among his fellow commandos. But Mayne, who was from Newtownards, near Belfast, was also a poet. There has been heated debate, too, about his sexuality, with at least one author suggesting he was gay.

“I don’t think anyone’s at liberty to make assumptions,” O’Connell says. “Biographical accounts show there were questions as to his sexuality. What I enjoyed was portraying the ambiguity of that. We know enough to say that he didn’t ‘come out’. As an actor, you want to understand why. I imagine the answer to that is quite obvious.”

He’s “immensely proud” of the drama, which has already been re-commissioned for a second series by the BBC and seems certain to be another hit for Knight, with its combination of action and adventure accompanied by an amphetamine-charged punk and heavy-rock soundtrack, and stirring performances from O’Connell and Sex Education’s Connor Swindells, who plays SAS founder David Stirling. It took weeks of filming in the heat of the Sahara. “What we had to endure out there was gruelling,” O’Connell says, “but it had to be.”

O’Connell has resisted major movie franchises so far, but doesn’t rule out joining one in the future. Is it time for a working-class Bond? “Sure, why not,” he says, before adding, “I think Daniel Craig is technically working class… Oh, I don’t want to get into this.”

O’Connell grew up in a working-class household in Derby, heavily influenced by the sporting ­trad­itions of his mother Alison’s family (her father Ken Gutteridge managed Burton Albion FC and was a coach and scout for Derby County) and the Irish expat milieu of his railway-worker father, Johnny, who was from Co Kerry. “I was doing Irish dancing before football took over, heavy jigs and reels,” O’Connell says. He had trials for his hometown club, and credits dancing with giving him co-ordinated feet. “My dad was the driving force behind that. There was a big Irish community in Derby, I went to two Catholic schools – nearly everyone’s name had an apostrophe in it. I think Irishness is woven into my identity.”

He was “far from a star student” at school, he says – “what was available to me was a one-size-fits-all type of schooling. And if you didn’t conform, you were sent out of the room or made to face a wall in some corridor.”

He’s now studying for a degree in history with the Open University. “I don’t think I had to leave school to develop this thirst for knowledge,” he says, “but what I’ve found these days is a renewed ambition to educate yourself. I think it’s a terrible thing to waste.”

Acting offered an early escape route, via the Central Junior Television Workshop in Nottingham, which also produced stars like McClure and Samantha Morton. “I’ve definitely seen the channels that were available to me when I was a kid wither to a point now where they don’t exist,” says O’Connell. “The depressing fact is, I wouldn’t know what advice to give a young working-class fella or female if they wanted to pursue this career.

“If you look across the board in the arts within Britain, some really f------ phenomenal art comes out of the working classes. And I definitely see an injustice that drama is not made available to all, like it was to me when I was growing up. The secondary school that made it compulsory for me to experience drama has taken drama off the curriculum.”

O’Connell is currently working on a writing/producing project, but doesn’t want to “jinx it” by saying too much. “I feel determined to be part of the solution,” he says, “develop your own production company, provide opportunities. I mean, we can all sit on a soapbox and whinge about the injustice of the world. But that really makes a difference. And that’s what I’m trying to gear towards.”

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SAS Rogue Heroes begins on BBC One at 9pm on Oct 30; Lady Chatterley’s Lover is in cinemas from Nov 25 and on Netflix from Dec 2