Common interview: The rapper-cum-actor reveals the films that influenced his role alongside Liam Neeson in Run All Night

Common was the star of the Oscars. And now he is facing off with Liam Neeson in a high-octane thriller. But how does he explain that snub of Oprah, asks Tom Teodorczuk

Not so common: the actor in Los Angeles (Getty Images)

History will surely regard this year's Oscars as having benefited from the Common touch. The hip hop artist-cum actor Common won Best Original Song for his song "Glory" from the Martin Luther King biopic Selma, which he sang and wrote with John Legend, and their inspirational performance sent social media, which had hitherto been regarding the Oscars as distinctly underwhelming, into an excitable frenzy.

When I interview Common a fortnight later in a hotel in midtown Manhattan for his new film Run All Night, a high-octane thriller in which he plays a cold-blooded assassin seeking to kill a Brooklyn mobster played by Liam Neeson, he's still buzzing from the memory of the Academy Awards. "It's still fresh," he recalls. "I felt the excitement myself but then people told me, 'Congratulations', and it's a good feeling because people say it really moved them."

Common, along with Legend and some members of the crowd, walked across a replica of the Edmund Pettus Bridge at the awards ceremony. The bridge, which features in Selma, is the site where armed policemen attacked peaceful civil rights demonstrators as they crossed the Alabama River during Bloody Sunday on 7 March, 1965. The speech that Common gave afterwards, which touched on themes of equal rights and referenced the historic day, moved some of the Oscars audience to tears.

"The sentiment behind what I'm feeling is a great feeling because you want to create art that can move people and better the world," he says. "Not everything you do is going to do it but you want to have some things that have that impact. The way people responded to Selma and to Glory and to our performance at the Oscars is a beautiful thing."

Common with Liam Neeson in 'Run All Night' (Warner Bros)

Throughout the entire interview, Common (real name Lonnie Lynn) speaks with a smile on his face and his positivity is a surprising contrast to the grittiness and rancour that some rappers wear as a badge of honour. As well as his Grammy Award-winning poetic music, he has written four books on the human spirit and narrated a documentary, Bouncing Cats, chronicling how hip hop empowers children in Uganda, and promotes self-belief through his Common Good Foundation.

The road from rap to film is a well-trodden one – think Eminem, Will Smith, LL Cool J and Ice-T. As well as playing civil rights leader Jimmy Bevel in Selma, Chicago-born Common, 43, acted in Ridley Scott's American Gangster and performed alongside Angelina Jolie in Wanted. He also played opposite Christian Bale in Terminator Salvation. It's a solid cinematic CV but he wants to take more risks with his screen roles.

"I wanna strive to be a great actor and take roles on that nobody would expect me to play and that may have been written for a whole type of other human being," he says. "When I look at the actors that I've loved – whether it's Sean Penn or Philip Seymour Hoffman – these people can go anywhere."

In Run All Night, Common plays methodical assassin Andrew Price alongside partner in crime, Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris). Filming with Liam Neeson was a "monumental moment in film for me since he's one of the great actors that we have alive", but he found it his most challenging part to date: "It's hard. First you've got to figure out how to get there but once you get there, it's really fun. It's good because I do my best to stay positive in life so it's good to be able to go out and shoot people in a movie." He extensively researched killers and "found people who were definitely transmitting evil. Not that I was able to emulate them."

Liam Neeson is a Brooklyn mobster in 'Run All Night' (Warner Bros) (2013 Warner Bros)

Common cites Pulp Fiction, along with Stand by Me, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Forrest Gump and the Lethal Weapon films as the movies that influenced him when he was growing up. His assassin is in the same no-nonsense mould as the type Harvey Keitel specialised in portraying in Pulp Fiction and other films: "We didn't want him to be a stereotypical assassin and I think we were able to bring nuances to him that were unique and definitely something you had never seen from a person of colour playing an assassin… some of the hitmen we've seen that have come from people of colour usually get to do the street gangster guy. They get them from a background that seems like the tough, big guy, the heavy. Price doesn't feel like that. He's like hi-tec, almost a scientist when it comes to assassinating people. He becomes a different type of villain."

Run All Night's Spanish director Jaume Collet-Sera, who has masterminded Liam Neeson's unlikely third-act career reinvention as an action hero, extolled the benefits of having a nice guy go round killing people in his film. "It was important that this was almost a character from another movie," he says. "In our world of Irish and Albanian mafia, there is no one who can beat Liam, so somebody has to come from another movie and try to beat him! I needed somebody who could be completely way off. Being the nicest guy in the world, it shows off his acting ability that he can play someone almost not human."

Common performing with John Legend at the Oscars (Getty) (Getty Images)

Common possesses eclectic musical taste. As well as NWA and Run DMC, he says his musical influences were The Eurythmics ("it was nice to see Annie Lennox performing at the Grammy's. She really tore it up.") His next album, he says, will encapsulate his multimedia ambitions and will be accompanied by a short film "and [I'll] hopefully make it a play eventually". He very rarely lapses into New Age speak, aware of striking the right note when talking about his causes: "If I'm talking about something socially conscious, I never try to beat people over the head with it. I don't have all the answers and I'm just trying to share information if I do have it or inspire somebody to hope or do better in their lives."

But sometimes a modern celebrity just can't escape negativity. Following the Oscars performance, Common was reported to have snubbed Selma producer Oprah Winfrey when she tried to high-five him as he walked up to collect his Academy Award. I ask him what really happened: "Oprah had her hand up to give me a clap – I thought she was giving John a clap so I went past her hand and went to [Selma actor] David Oyelowo. They created a big hype about it. Oprah is someone who I love dearly so I have nothing but reverence for her. I talked to her the next day and I don't think she even knew that happened. This is a billion-dollar woman! Do you think she cares if I walked a little past her? But it wasn't done on purpose!"

The smile stays intact.

'Run All Night' is on general release