Sam Riley on Islands, acting without words and the shadow of playing Ian Curtis

It’s usually a mistake to conflate an actor with the role they’re playing, although in the case of Sam Riley and his character in Islands, Tom, he’s happy to invite the parallels. “I just thought, ‘I know this guy’,” Riley says when we speak ahead of Islands’ UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival. Once a promising tennis pro in his youth, Tom is now slumming it as the in-house tennis coach at a tourist resort in Fuerteventura. “He’s sort of coming into middle age and haunted by early success, having potentially never lived up to it, either in his own mind or being permanently reminded of it. So I know a bit about that.”

Riley, with a slight twinkle in his eye, is in a roundabout way referring to his own blistering beginnings as an actor in 2007’s Control, in which he played Ian Curtis, the enigmatic frontman of Joy Division. It’s certainly one of the most celebrated British acting debuts in recent memory, and while Riley has been excellent in noteworthy films since, it’s fair to say he’s still best known for that barnstorming breakthrough 18 years ago. “I’m aware that that’s what a lot of people think,” admits Riley. “And I understand it. Control was a perfect fit for me. Plus, nobody knew who I was. When you show someone a magic trick for the first time, it’s great, isn’t it? But [roles like that] don’t come along every day. I wasn’t offered a million brilliant lead roles after that.”

Tom in Islands should be filed as one of those elusive, brilliant lead roles. The film begins as a character study of an athlete gone to seed. When we first meet Tom, he’s lying face down in the Fuerteventura desert after a night of too much tequila at the local discotheque, and we’re introduced to his ignoble routine. He goes through the motions of his monotonous day job, teeing up volleys for holidaymakers while nursing a hangover, and then he heads back out to the club at sundown, only to wake up the next morning late for work in another strange location, and the cycle begins all over again.

Tom’s self-destructive lifestyle is interrupted by the arrival of a young British couple, Anne (Stacy Martin) and Dave (Jack Farthing). Initially, they hire Tom to coach their son, but he quickly becomes entangled in the pair’s marital strife. Just when you think you’re watching a relationship triangle play out, however, Islands takes the first of several sharp turns towards noir when Dave goes missing during a night of drinking at the club with Tom. As per usual, Tom has blacked out and doesn’t know what’s happened, so the dissolute tennis coach becomes a befuddled detective as he joins Anne in her search for Dave’s whereabouts.

Islands’ writer-director Jan-Ole Gerster explains why Riley was perfect for the role. “There was something about Sam that gave me the feeling he’s the right guy,” the German filmmaker told me by video a few weeks after that UK premiere, “and it’s not so much that he looks like a former tennis player. Sam has this very special voice and this rather insecure smile, and there’s something about his eyes, you know? He brought so many interesting elements to this character by his presence and charisma alone. I fell in love with the idea he would play Tom.”

Gerster reckons that in another actor’s hands, this faded sports star clinging to his youth could have been a cliché. “Tom was written as this rather pathetic character in an existential crisis who then suddenly has people relying on him, so he is something of a stereotype. But thanks to Sam, he ended up having so much vulnerability and depth and doubt. He really turned Tom into someone much more unique; he feels almost like a character from literature.”

Part of what makes Riley’s performance so impressive is that most of the revelations in the film are never said out loud, and instead play out on the actor’s face. “I rewatched Control and some of Sam’s other films, especially On the Road [2012], the Jack Kerouac movie, and they’re full of moments that convinced me that he was able to carry all these inner processes of the character,” explains Gerster. “Because of Sam, we understand that there is something going on and he’s putting together a puzzle in his head from what he sees and hears, and that he’s kind of reconnecting with his emotional life, without him ever talking about it. This is what separates the boys from the men when it comes to acting, I guess.”

Riley doesn’t quite see it that way. For him, exposition is much more difficult. “To say stuff that you’d never say in real life, that’s when you earn your money; to say shit lines convincingly is the hardest thing about acting.” It was on the set of Control where he learned it’s often better as an actor to keep your mouth shut. “I remember doing a scene with Samantha Morton. It was this huge argument where her character finds out about Ian’s lover. And Samantha asked me, ‘Have you ever cheated on anyone?’ and I was like, ‘OK, maybe.’ She asked, ‘What happened when you were confronted?’ I said, ‘I don’t think I said anything,’ and she went, ‘Right, then do that.’ So when she came in the room and went off on one, I didn’t say anything. She walked me into the corner, and I just burst into tears in real life, and I was like, ‘Fuck me, that felt so real. This is acting.’”

Tom isn’t the only gumshoe character Riley’s portrayed recently. He also plays a detective investigating parallel universes in Ben Wheatley’s upcoming lo-fi experiment BULK. In Riley’s adopted home of Germany, meanwhile, he’s just been nominated for two Lolas (aka the German Film Awards). One for Islands and one for his lead role in Cranko, where he plays the brilliant dancer and choreographer John Cranko and acts in German. He’ll also be seen on the small screen very soon, this time displaying a Scottish accent, in Charlotte Regan’s Glasgow-set series Mint. “I’m back”, he jokes at his current glut of work. “It’s like the McConaissance, but the Riley version.”

The Riley Renaissance, I suggest weakly. “Maybe I’ll work on the name,” he laughs.

Islands is in cinemas from 12 September.