Navy knitted wool jumper with embellishment by GUCCI 

Orange knitted wool jumper by HERMES and navy wool trousers by DUNHILL 

While his character in The Riot Club was a raging snob, Booth (who wears a Topman t-shirt and jeans for our meeting) has just been keeping it real by sharing a bed in an apartment on a holiday with his mates. “I was in Chamonix with a bunch of old school mates. Some of them have been living there on ski seasons. There were five of us in this tiny apartment. I was sharing a bed with my mate Felix. We had to move our bags to one side of the room and fold out the bed to go to bed.”

He reckons about two thirds of his friends are old mates, and a third are industry mates. “Freddie Fox became one of my best friends in Worried About The Boy and we worked together on The Riot Club. All of the Riot Club boys became really close, really good friends.”

A highlight of his year is Glastonbury. “I’ll be doing Glastonbury. All agents hate Glastonbury. None of their clients are free. Everyone’s got their “brother’s wedding” in June, it drives them mad.” Any other festival plans? “I want to go to Burning Man,” he says. When I tell him that I’ve been, he turns the tables and starts to quiz me. “That sounds like heaven. I love finding myself in places where in any other situation you’d think it was a dream. I’ve always had a massive imagination. When I go to sleep I can get lost in bizarre worlds. When such places come to life in the real world it’s quite satisfying.”

Let’s test this imagination, then. If he could time travel – just for a short while – would he go back or forwards? “Back, I think,” he says, before correcting himself. “Maybe forwards… but no, you’d never be happy with your iPhone again. You’d be like, ‘I want what he had.’ You don’t want to know your future. Life’s exciting because you don’t know what happens next.”

He may not know exactly what’s next, but Booth does have an intriguing role in the bag, as Mr Bingley in the upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Yes, you read that correctly. “It’s so much fun. I’m not very interested in doing a zombie movie [where I’m] being chased from A to B, but it’s not like that. It’s Pride and Prejudice set in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. What makes it hilarious is the upper classes trying to survive the same way. Jack Huston is Wickham, Lily James is Elizabeth Bennet and Sam Riley is Mr Darcy. It’s brilliant.”

Meanwhile he’s testing for “one big exciting thing” and has “another three or four things on the cards that begin probably in the spring.” Then, he says, he’s going to California for his mum’s 50th birthday. That would be Vivien, a painter, who raised him in London and Kent along with her financier husband. Booth seems like a well-adjusted, intelligent, middle- class chap who enjoys a party and hanging out with his mates. If he didn’t look like a movie star – and indeed work as one – he’d be one of the guys.

While clearly committed to his career, the actor is no workaholic, openly admitting that the British pace is preferable to the work-heavy Hollywood scene. “I am so glad I came from here. When you launch yourself in America, there’s so much work over there, so many TV series – these guys get pulled into doing all this stuff, to do this series and that series, to be in Gossip Girl 2. Here, you have a much smaller industry and a smaller pool of talent and agents with really great taste. You can protect yourself here. You’ve got time to incubate your career. That’s what I’ve tried to do. If I was in America, I can’t imagine my first performance being Boy George – shaving my eyebrows off and being able to take that risk. I love being a British actor and being able to live and work out of London and drop into America to get the best of both worlds.”

While most actors hedge their bets on the subject of moving to America one day, Booth seems very certain that he won’t. “I would never move there. If I was ever in the position to, I would love to buy a house there, if dreams come true, but I’d always live here. It’s always been my base. I love it. I cycle everywhere, I love the streets, the people. I love going to LA too, one of my best friends lives there, but after four weeks I’m ready to come home and have a reality check.”

What does he miss about England when he’s not home? ”I miss the narrow, bendy roads which you don’t get in America. A really narrow, bendy road in the fog that leads to a beautiful old pub with a fireplace and I walk in and all my mates are round the fire, drinking beer and ale and laughing – drunk, having a good time.”

Currently single and hot acting property, Booth can count the world as his oyster,
but you’ve got to love his devotion to his homeland, and his homeland’s fashion scene. He recently attended London Collections: Men. “I discovered new, little brands at LCM. At the opening drinks they had all these young designers with stalls, you see all these young designers creating really great stuff. There’s a lot of talent out there – in acting as well as in fashion. It’s a good time to be British.”