Dylan Moran: Don't make me laugh

The comedian Dylan Moran has made it into the movies – alongside Michael Caine, no less. But is he happy? Not really: the acting is great, but being a celebrity is no joke, he tells James Rampton

Dylan Moran's face is plastered across the sides of double-decker buses – and the actor is not at all happy about it. "I saw one the other day," he sighs, "and I immediately looked down at the pavement in acute embarrassment. It's ridiculous." It may very well be, but Moran is going to have to get used to it. The posters are advertising The Actors, an engaging new movie that opens next week.

Starring in the film alongside such luminaries as Michael Caine, Michael Gambon and Miranda Richardson, Moran more than holds his own. Now there are reports that he is to headline in the film version of the West End hit Stones in His Pockets. So, from here on in, his profile is going to get higher, and he is not relishing the prospect.

Devouring coffee and cigarettes in a London hotel, Moran, who has built his career on a curmudgeonly demeanour that Victor Meldrew might envy, is a picture of distracted dishevelment. The creases in his unironed shirt are mirrored in his matted, bed-head locks. Although he has a reputation for being, as one journalist has put it, "perennially morose, a reveller in Eeyore-esque gloom", that is to mistake the persona for the person. Moran is, in fact, absorbing company. How can you not be fascinated by a man who takes such genuine delight in language and casually drops in sentences such as, "Youth leaks from you. It doesn't leave a note or slam the door. You're just left there older, with dead spiders for eyes and fire-retardant hair"? There is a twinkle about Moran; he is a master of the ironic line, and most of the best are at his own expense.

Reflecting on his increasing prominence, Moran acknowledges: "I'm not looking forward to that aspect of it. Nobody sane would. But there must be a way of doing the work and not getting involved in the celebrity bullshit at the same time. The problem is that, once you're in front of a camera, people are going to peg you as one thing or another. I'm mystified by a lot of what I read about myself, and I'm not even particularly well known. People are also asking me to please come and talk to Splunge magazine about my cutlery. I've got no time for all that. You're not likely to see me in Hello!."

Even so, the reluctant star is not going to be able to avoid the attention for ever – if only because he gives such an eye-catching performance in The Actors, which is adapted from a Neil Jordan story and directed by Conor McPherson. The 31-year-old from Navan, in Co Meath, is best known for a pair of characters at two with the world (Ian in Simon Nye's BBC2 comedy How Do You Want Me?, and Bernard in Channel 4's Bafta-winning sitcom Black Books). In The Actors, he plays Tom, a laughably bad Dublin actor who joins forces with another hammy thespian (Caine) in a far-fetched plot to scam a large wodge of cash from a gang of inept local hoods led by the dozy Barreller (Gambon).

Despite the liveliness of Moran's performance, critics may still carp about yet another comic "jumping the counter" into straight drama. But he is not unduly fussed. "Of course, every actor wants universal hosannas and handfuls of caviar thrown at them, but you can't let the critics get to you when that doesn't happen. It's the function of sneery critics to sneer. They don't want to work out their childhood problems, so they become sneery critics instead. I hope they and their children flourish."

All the same, he concedes that he was initially apprehensive about the project. After all, what young actor with limited experience of straight drama – which, in Moran's case, was restricted to a cameo in Notting Hill – wouldn't be nervous about the idea of appearing alongside Caine?

However, Moran says he "soon realised that you can't walk around pointing at him all the time and saying, 'Look, it's Michael Caine.' That's distracting. Also, great actors are great collaborators. Working with Caine and Gambon is like going to one of those really posh restaurants where waiters dive out of an alcove to light your cigarette or brush your forelock out of your eyes. They make life easy for you."

In The Actors, as Tom desperately attempts to bamboozle the bad guys, he has to pretend to be three different characters: an aged cockney geezer, a fiery, red-headed Scot and an American Mafia hitman. In showing this versatility, Moran proves that there is more to him than playing the spiritual leader of the miserablist tendency.

His performance in the film also evinces a welcome subtlety. "Black Books is a cartoon with people. It's exaggerated, an acquired taste – like oysters served with a side-order of dead dog. So, on The Actors, the director and I developed a code. From time to time, he would sing the Muppets theme tune to me, which meant, 'Forget the big cartoony thing.'

"Tom has to be played straight. If you go too broad and do a tedious nudge-nudge, wink-wink act to the audience, you end up with a kid's film, a silly, zany affair. If Black Books is crazy, vaudevillian schtick in which mentally we're in shorts, then in The Actors I'm wearing longer trousers."

Moran burst on to the scene in 1996 when his slurred, stream-of-consciousness stand-up act made him the youngest winner of the Perrier award at the Edinburgh Festival. He is now developing the third series of Black Books. It is this sitcom that has established his angry-young-man image in the public mind. "As a comic persona, misanthropy is as old as the hills," he says. "It's effective because everyone is pissed off for large sections of their life, so they orgasm when they watch someone else in a similar mood. Why do people throng to films where the characters wipe out great swathes of the population with an Uzi? Probably because they are annoyed about having been stuck in traffic for the past month and their Subaru doesn't come with an Uzi under the drinks-holder."

Although in real life Moran is far more amiable than the cantankerous Bernard, he can still rant with the best of them. He is, for instance, aghast at the public's apparently insatiable appetite for trashy celebs. "There is a constant Gatling gun of nitwits being fired at you, programmes where they come and tell you you're fat and your house is shit. Where else can it go? Celebrity critics turning up at Margaret Atwood's house and telling her to write better novels?"

Hitting his rhetorical stride now, Moran goes on to tackle the subject of growing older. "Whenever I stop working, I can feel senility creeping up behind me and linking its fingers around my neck. The other day, two young people came up to ask me for directions, and I was paralysed with fear. I thought they wanted to go away with one of my organs. When you get older, you suddenly feel like a brontosaurus surrounded by a gang of velociraptors on motorbikes."

Fear of ageing aside, things are going pretty well for Moran. But will all the success tempt him into a big-money transfer to Hollywood? He is characteristically dismissive of such a notion. "I'm not trying to move any closer to LA. I'm moving to Derby instead. It's not on my things-to-do list. In fact, all that's on my things-to-do list is getting a things-to-do list."

But Moran has plenty to occupy him. As well as the third run of Black Books, he has penned another television comedy. "For want of a better description, it's a sketch show," he says. "It appears that I've written a whole series. I don't quite understand how it happened, but it did."

As if that weren't enough, Moran has been working on some prose. "It could turn out to be a novel... or", he adds, still incapable of taking himself seriously for more than half a sentence, "a long and difficult-to-follow laundry list."

'The Actors' is released on 16 May