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he’s also an avowed atheist who finds himself at odds with his fellow students and the dean (Tracy Letts) of his Ohio college over his religious (non) beliefs.

Lerman’s problem, if that’s what you can call it, came with the film’s standout scene — an eighteen-minute debate between Marcus and Dean Caudwell about the existence of God, shot in an unbroken take. “More than anything, that centrepiece in the film, that’s what made me really want to do this film,” he says. “And it also made me want to drop out several times, because I was afraid I couldn’t do it.”

He leans forward, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “I literally, I never told James this, but there were so many times when I was calling my representation, saying, ‘How do I get out of this? I’m too afraid to do it! How do I get out of this?’ and they were like, ‘You don’t get out of it, you’re involved in the movie, you’re a producer too!’”

If there were nerves on the day, Schamus didn’t notice. The Oscarnominated writer-producer, a regular collaborator with Ang Lee, makes his own directorial debut with was immediately taken with Lerman’s “transcendent” ability to relate to his fellow co-stars on screen. “He’s a very giving actor,” he says. “He doesn’t take. He actually gives.”

Raised in Beverly Hills — his father is an orthodontist, his mother works as his manager — Lerman comes from a strong Jewish background. His paternal grandfather, Max Lerman, was born to a Polish-Jewish family in Berlin, fleeing the country in the 1930s because of the Nazi regime. Lerman himself attended Hebrew School (witness his perfect Hebrew in TV show

Such an upbringing meant he immediately recognised the family dynamic, the core values and the Yiddish at the heart of “I grew up with those things, so it made it a little bit easier to relate to the character,” he nods. “But that’s not something that attracted me to the project. It was really the substance of the material, and the depth of the character.”

Characters like Marcus rarely get offered to actors his age, he explains. Marcus experiences his first real sexual awakening on campus (with Sarah Gadon, who plays fellow student Olivia), but for Lerman it’s the character’s intellectual flowering that intrigues. “He’s a very compelling character on the page,” says Lerman. “His intellect and intensity from having to repress his opin-

It’s not going to be a movie that just away