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There is something slightly surreal about interviewing Dexter Sol Ansell.
At 11 years old, he is already disarmingly professional, calmly discussing character motivation, the directors he admires, filming in water so cold he ‘turned blue,’ and the precise qualities required to coax a good performance out of an actor.
He also has the sort of baby face that makes him look a good four or five years younger than his 11 years, so hearing him discuss the finer points of his craft is a bit like watching a ferret expertly restore a vintage Jaguar: impressive, adorable, and faintly eerie.
Then, every so often, the extremely accomplished actor disappears, and a little boy pops back out.
When I ask whether his A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms character Egg would get along with Maisie Williams’ Game of Thrones heroine Arya Stark, Dexter pauses, considers it, then hollers: ‘MUM! Mum! Do you think they’d get along?’
Mum confirms they probably would, so Dexter easily absorbs the opinion as his own.
The funny thing is, Dexter doesn’t seem to find this contrast remotely unusual or feel any pressure to choose between personas. Why would he? He’s been navigating film sets and playgrounds in parallel since he was four.
He began acting in Emmerdale as a small child and has since appeared in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, The Midwich Cuckoos, Hullraisers, Here and Robin and the Hoods, before landing the role of Egg in HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
His earliest clear memory of his career is not a tender artistic awakening.
‘I was filming Emmerdale. I was four years old, and I got to hold a gun in a scene at four, so I remember that scene,’ he recalls, with exactly the amount of enthusiasm you would expect from a little boy who had just been handed a pretend gun.
His latest film, 500 Miles, offered its own memorable adventures, although several sound less glamorous than the finished film suggests. Filming in the Irish Sea in November was so cold that Dexter says some takes could last only seconds before ‘my whole body just went blue’.
On another day, while filming on a boat, he was surrounded by bees and wasps attracted to the fake sick around his mouth before one stung him.
There was, however, an upside: ‘They had a lifeguard boat in case anything happened, so I got to go on the lifeguard boat, and we went really fast all around. It was really fun.’
Only an 11-year-old could turn being stung by a wasp while covered in fake vomit into a glowing production anecdote.
The film sees him play Charlie, the irrepressible younger brother of Finn (Jojo Rabbit star Roman Griffin Davis), who runs away with him after overhearing their separating parents discussing splitting up the family.
The pair embark on an ambitious 500-mile journey from Sheffield to Dingle on the west coast of Ireland, hoping to find their estranged grandfather, played by Bill Nighy, with Maisie Williams also appearing as busker Kait.
It’s an emotional road movie about grief, family and brotherhood, although Dexter was initially attracted to something much simpler about Charlie: ‘I loved his excitement. I loved his energy.’
Having just finished filming the first season of Game of Thrones spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, he was ready for a change of pace.
‘I’d just done a really serious project,’ he tells me. ‘I wanted to do something more brighter, and this came along, and I was like, “This is perfect.”’
There is a significant twist involving Charlie which it would be criminal to spoil here, but it makes Dexter’s apparently effortless performance considerably more impressive.
His solution to the potentially complicated mechanics of playing it was wonderfully uncomplicated: ‘I wanted to make it as real as possible.’
That seems to be Dexter’s approach to acting generally.
Ask an adult actor about their ‘process’ and there’s a reasonable chance you’ll end up somewhere involving emotional memory, elaborate playlists and three months living alone in a cabin.
Ask Dexter and he reacts slightly as though I’ve asked him to explain his process for bending his arm to pick something up. ‘I’m just chill,’ he says of getting into character on set.
Acting has been part of his life for so long that he struggles to separate it from everything else.
‘It doesn’t feel like work. It feels like fun. It doesn’t even feel like work, and it doesn’t feel like fun. It just feels like my life,’ he explains. ‘It’s just how I’ve been brought up. So I just feel like, “Yeah, that’s what I do every day.”’
He does, however, have one ritual for auditions: blasting Eye of the Tiger.
Once somebody calls action, Dexter describes something considerably more instinctive happening.
‘Action is like a hypnotise to me [sic],’ he says. ‘Every time they say action, I forget everything in real life. It just all goes to blank. I just sort of am this character.’
It is an unusually assured answer from somebody who still has primary school classmates, although they are apparently suitably impressed by his increasingly extraordinary CV.
His school is hiring out a cinema so pupils and teachers can watch 500 Miles together, something Dexter tells me with genuine excitement.
His friends ‘find it cool’, although there is one slight snag to having a classmate starring in one of television’s biggest franchises: ‘Lots of the jobs I’ve done they obviously can’t watch, like Seven Kingdoms and stuff.’
He also loved working with Nighy, who apparently dispensed spontaneous life advice between scenes. ‘He just stood up and did a whole speech about life,’ Dexter remembers.
The wisdom from one of Britain’s most celebrated actors? ‘Pay your taxes, don’t smoke, don’t do any of the bad stuff.’
Not quite Shakespeare, perhaps, but considerably more useful to an 11-year-old.
Yet one of the loveliest things about talking to Dexter is how little his success appears to have made his world revolve around being successful.
Asked what he does when he isn’t acting, he talks about fishing with his dad, going to arcades and seeing friends.
‘I love hanging out with my friends and all kid stuff,’ he says. ‘All kids stuff.’
He already knows, though, that films are where he wants to stay.
Dexter wants to act ‘forever’, but also hopes to direct and has begun writing, while his dream role is something with the spirit of Billy Elliot – not necessarily the singing and dancing (‘ish’, he says when I ask whether he can do either), but a character who goes ‘from nothing to all of this.’
For someone who has been doing this since before he could properly understand what having a career meant, that ambition feels remarkably uncomplicated.
Adults on film sets don’t intimidate him either. He has worked around them since he was four, so the distinction barely registers.
‘I see them as just friends,’ he says. ‘So an adult is a friend. A kid is a friend.’
It is perhaps the neatest explanation for Dexter himself. He can talk convincingly about the importance of a director explaining where a character has come from emotionally and where they are going next, then need to consult Mum on Game of Thrones lore.
He can hold his own opposite Bill Nighy, plunge into the Irish Sea in November, and explain an acting instinct plenty of performers spend decades trying to acquire.
And then he goes back to school, where all his mates are getting a day off to go to the cinema and watch his new film. For now, that might still be the coolest part for him.
500 Miles is now available to purchase on platforms like Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video.