Nicholas Galitzine was never supposed to be an actor. The Londoner was invested in sports growing up, a keen footballer who also trained as a rugby player and competed in county-level athletics. A damaged rotator cuff (that’s a bad shoulder in layman’s terms) unexpectedly swerved him away from sport, but like all good stories, the tale of how Galitzine ended up an actor starts with a spark of romance, or an attempted one, at least.

“There was a girl who was going up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival who I really fancied,” he reminisces, his voice tangibly imbued with a smile as it crackles through the phone from Los Angeles. “I did [the festival] so I could go chase this girl. And I came back with this acting agency.”

After his fateful signing, Galitzine got his first break, playing the lead role of Tom in John Williams’ 2014 feature The Beat Beneath My Feet. His first exposure to film won him a steady stream of work, acting alongside the likes of Anjelica Huston and Timothy Spall, before he was cast in this year’s Netflix release, Chambers.

For the uninitiated, Chambers is the latest in the recent wave of creepy-yet-beautiful Netflix sci-fi offerings. Set in the fictional, dreamily-named town of Crystal Valley, the show follows the story of a teenager who, having received a life-saving heart transplant, becomes a haunted by the spirit of her donor, leading her to questions to circumstances in which she died. Galitzine plays Elliot, the mourning brother of the donor, and son of Uma Thurman’s eerily-obsessive Nancy Lefevre. He’s also a struggling heroin addict.

“His predicament is not your typical addict story,” Galitzine explains. The aim for both the actor and his director, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, was “to make him as human as possible”. Interestingly and somewhat ironically, despite being initially pitched as the most “wayward” of the family, it’s Elliot who becomes the show’s Greek chorus of sorts, maintaining a sense of morality, and even sanity, when those around him fail to do so. “He very much becomes the moral compass of the show,” Galitzine continues. “He has a very strong moral code and knows exactly what’s right and what’s wrong when everyone, especially his family, seems to still be trying to figure that out.” Using a character battling addiction as the voice of reason flips the tired demonisation of users or those in recovery.

The timing of shows like Chambers and the escapist pleasure they bring isn’t lost on Galitzine, who speaks openly on the alleviating role such projects and genres can have. “There’s so much heavy stuff, whether you live in the US talking about the political socio-economic struggles, or in the UK with Brexit, or even if it’s just the mundane sort of everyday life. As people, we need that escapism, and there’s something very tribal about creating these spectacular stories; we’ve done that since prehistoric times. We need that weird, super-magical thing in our lives.”