Rising Star: Thomas Fisher

Camden born and raised, actor Thomas Fisher knows a bit about struggling with London life.

But then the 33-year-old, who recently featured in The Mummy Returns, is in a unique position this week: starring in two very different semi-improvised takes on the capital, The Truth Game and The Nine Lives Of Tomas Katz.

'London can be a competitive place,' he reflects. 'You have to have energy to keep your head above water and earn money. It's true, that thing of being at parties and feeling that you're drowning. That you're not up to speed with everyone else because your life isn't as good. I recognise those people who are miserable, working too hard and are bitter about their lives.'

In The Truth Game, directed by Simon Rumley - who recently cast the actor as a drag queen in his next film Club Le Monde - Fisher plays Alan, one of six Londoners at an emotionally turbulent dinner party that serves up large helpings of conversation and recrimination. 'I'm reluctant to admit that I am like Alan,' confesses Fisher, who like his character did work in a hostel for schizophrenics. 'He's slightly vague but he's decent, so that's all right.'

In Ben Hopkins's distinctly surreal and refreshing Tomas Katz, Fisher plays - a la Alec Guinness - nine different characters, as the mysterious figure of Katz patrols a London on the brink of apocalypse, inhabiting various people's bodies. Having met Hopkins at Oxford University, where the pair began to co-write the script, Fisher would later go on to star in the director's debut, Simon Magus, before returning to Tomas Katz.

'Ben wanted to come up with a story where I played a number of different characters, so he spun this story around it,' Fisher recalls. 'At its heart is an idea about materialism. But we both like peculiar, mad jokes - like all the ones about the bollards. It's a real London film in that way.'

Low-budget film-making is a far cry from the 'huge operation' that was The Mummy Returns. 'Getting the 53 bus up the Old Kent Road to Simon's flat every morning was a bit different to having a huge Mercedes pulling up outside your door,' reflects Fisher, who didn't begin acting until he was 22. In The Mummy Returns he played one of the incompetent criminals who unleash the Mummy's curse. 'This huge box arrived in the post the other day from Santa Monica, California. And it was a poster that said, 'The biggest non-holiday weekend opening ever! $68 million.' But it feels a bit remote. My newsagent was impressed, mind.'