Christopher Eccleston on the sex scene that still upsets him: ‘An A-list actress implied I was copping a feel’

I’ve had imposter syndrome for most of my life and career,” says Christopher Eccleston. And as his arresting blue eyes lock onto the lens of his camera phone, I think I can feel that. Though he’s a warm, steady and thoughtful conversationalist, I’m reminded of the times I’ve felt fear, suspicion, uncertainty and rising panic in his face on screen.

That anxiety fed into the mounting dread he expressed in his 1991 breakout film Let Him Have It, in which he starred as Derek Bentley, who was hanged for murder in an infamous real-life miscarriage of justice; it prickled through the paranoia of his character in Shallow Grave (1994) and in the way he burned with anarchist intensity in Our Friends in the North (1996). It added urgency to his Bafta-winning turn as the reborn Christ in Russell T Davies’s The Second Coming (2003); a twist of angst to his ninth Doctor in Doctor Who (2005); and a wounded malevolence to his embodiment of Malekith the Accursed in Thor: The Dark World (2013).

Now, at 59, he’s bringing the same unstable edge to his latest role as an inscrutable, adulterous police boss in the fourth season of True Detective. The HBO franchise, whose 2014 opening season starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, is known for its sweaty hypermasculinity. But although there are linked themes, each season functions as an independent drama, and season four shifts the action from men flexing their muscles in the sunny American South to tough women yanking on their snow boots in the icy dark of the Alaskan north.