The dream team: Ricky Gervais's bright young things

They make a handsome trio, you must admit; as languorous as Brideshead's Charles Ryder and the Flytes. But contrary to appearances, they don't spend all their time draped elegantly over the furniture and each other. Felicity Jones, Christian Cooke and Tom Hughes are rising stars, soon to appear in the first Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant big-screen collaboration,

Together they perform the usual actorly antics: hugging each other fondly for no particular reason, doing random warm-up stretches in front of a mirror, and remin-iscing happily about the 'endlessly long' summer they spent in Loughborough, Shepperton and Hampstead filming
Cemetery Junction. With lots of sunshine, flares and floppy hair, and fellow cast members including Emily Watson and Ralph Fiennes, it was, a wistful Christian says, 'probably the best time of my life'.

Set in the 1970s in Reading, where Ricky Gervais grew up, the film is steeped in nostalgia for the bad old days. At times it resembles a Hovis advert with jokes, but at its beating heart are three devoted friends struggling to escape a stifling small-town mentality and a job on a production line or, if they're lucky, selling insurance. No one understands the kids, least of all Christian Cooke's on-screen father, played by Ricky Gervais. 'Why do you want to go to
Paris?' he asks. 'There are parts of Reading you haven't seen.'

Gervais and Merchant, who also worked together on The Office and Extras, co-wrote, co-produced and co-directed the film. 'If one of them says it, the other one thinks it,' explains Christian. 'They're so in sync they do everything together,' he adds, before blurting out: 'They even leave the set to go for a slash together!'

Casting this trio was a labour of love for
Merchant and Gervais. They auditioned 'most of the UK's twenty-something actors', then chose Christian Cooke for his thoughtfulness and handsome vulnerability, and Tom Hughes because, according to Gervais, 'he is a rock star and a film star who embodies the spirit of Liam Gallagher, Richard Ashcroft and James Dean'. Felicity Jones, meanwhile, is described by the actor Matthew Goode (who plays her fiancé in Cemetery Junction) as having 'an Audrey Hepburn quality'.

Felicity, 26, may be an ethereal brunette, with a petite, balletic frame, but unlike Audrey Hepburn, she can do a top-rate rural accent. For years she appeared on The Archers as Emma Grundy, Ambridge's scarlet woman. 'Emurr' formed a love triangle with feuding brothers Ed and Will Grundy, which luckily resolved itself at around the same time that Felicity needed to focus on studying English at Oxford. Plum roles followed: Catherine Morland in the BBC's Northanger Abbey and the Hayley Mills character, Laurel, in The Chalk Garden at the Donmar Warehouse, for which she won a nomination for the Evening Standard Milton Shulman Award for Outstanding Newcomer.

In person she is friendly and quick to laugh. 'I haven't!' she cries when I accuse her of having lost her native Brummie accent. 'You still get the odd tone coming through if you listen carefully.' While still fond of the Midlands where her parents live, she is now based in
Bethnal Green, where the café at the Museum of Childhood is a favourite place to hang out and read scripts, when she isn't rummaging for clothes in charity shops. 'As I get more grown up I'm trying to acquire some more "classic" pieces,' she says. 'But then the other day I found a great vintage £5 coat' Off-duty, after the shoot, she throws on her grandmother's pearls and a full, netted polka-dot skirt. 'I don't know if it's too out-there,' she says doubtfully, though she looks fabulously bohemian. Her long-term boyfriend is Edward Fornieles, a young artist and founder of The Wallis Gallery, an East London showcase for emerging fine artists. 'It's really nice to be exposed to a completely different world to film,' she says. 'What they do is art in its purest form.'

Felicity has just finished playing Miranda in Julie Taymor's forthcoming adaptation of The Tempest, filmed on the island of Lana'i
in Hawaii. Helen Mirren played her mother, Prospera, and has become something of a
mentor. 'She's quite hippieish and relaxed about everything. I would do a take, and then stress for ages about whether it was any good, but she just said: "You've got to think of yourself as an archer with a bow and arrow – you shoot to hit the bull's-eye, but once you shoot, it's gone." Which I thought was a useful analogy.'

Hanging out with Dame Helen also provided an insight into the perils of fame. At the weekends the cast would bathe on the beaches of Lana'i – 'which felt so remote, like the end of the world. Then suddenly this paparazzi boat comes past, full of photographers snapping. She just takes it in her stride, saying it goes with the territory. And luckily, she looks amazing.'

Christian, 23, will be familiar to viewers of ITV dramas Trinity (a college romp in which he played, against type, a roaring toff) and Demons (a vampire nonsense in which he played the confused heir to the Van Helsing dynasty). He grew up in a small West Yorkshire town just outside Bradford; his mother is a medical secretary and his father works with people who are in care. He says he felt 'weird' when he first read the script for Cemetery
Junction 'because I saw so many parallels with my own mum and dad'. Just like his character in the film, they made a bid for freedom. 'They sold everything and went travelling round the world. It really changed them. Travel does do that. Especially in the 1970s when there was less TV and no internet.'

As Christian's career has taken off, it has allowed him to travel – to Budapest, for
example, while shooting Robin Hood for the BBC, in which he played Will Scarlett's
brother (and enjoyed quite a few 'long, heavy, indulgent, crazy nights' out with Keith Allen, aka the Sheriff of Nottingham). He's come
a long way since he was the child star of a
Birds Eye beefburger commercial. Nominally based in London, the day after our photo shoot he's due to head to Israel to film Peter Kosminsky's new Channel 4 drama Homeland. 'I'm playing a soldier so I ought to be really skinny and wiry,' he says. 'I've been trying to do this diet where I eat very frequently, but never complex carbohydrates.' It was all going well until he started having cravings for 'pizza or a white crusty loaf'. 'Bread!' he shouts. 'It's the bane of my life.'