Crime really does pay for Nesbitt

I play Jimmy Hands, a spectacularly failed bank robber who plans one last big job to get him out of crime. It puts him away for 12 years and he's desperate to escape, as he always is when he's inside.

One thing I liked about Jimmy was that, despite his mouthiness and bravado and gregariousness, he's actually vulnerable. Maybe people wouldn't think that of me, but they are things I recognise. He is lonely, but is set free when he falls in love with Olivia Williams.

It's a beguiling script. In a sense it's old-fashioned, harking back to movies from a bygone time such as Escape To Victory - yet it also has social realism. Ronan Bennett's writing is very sharp and well-observed. I was in Love Lies Bleeding, a television film that Ronan wrote based on his own time in prisons in Ireland and London. It was interesting that he had gone through those terrible experiences, but was still able, with Lucky Break, to write a film with such a deft comic touch.

I'm sure some people will say Lucky Break is idealised - but it's not meant to be Scum.

I was desperate to get the part because it was my first leading role in something that big. I was worried I would feel pressurised, because I know that to have me the film-makers probably had a terrible battle with the financiers.

It was tougher for Peter Cattaneo, the director, because he's made one movie, The Full Monty, which did extraordinarily well and the pressure on him to reproduce that success has been immense. But he was supportive and that took away my fears. It sounds clich?d, but it didn't feel like a job at all. It was something to look forward to every day.