I’m definitely in, like, a lot of the movie,” Spike Fearn says, shrugging. He’s front and centre of the poster, I tell him. “Yeah,” he nods. “That’s pretty strange. I’d never really thought about being on a poster before.”I don’t mean to panic Fearn, a 25-year-old from Coalville in Leicestershire who’s about to become a very big deal, but the film industry has a tendency to make stars out of the dudes in romantic comedies. Hugh Grant did Four Weddings. Heath Ledger did 10 Things I Hate About You. Even Aaron Taylor-Johnson has Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging in his back pocket. Fearn has a film out called Finding Emily, a fizzy Gen Z romcom in which he flails, charms, sings, and sports a floppy Gallagher Brother haircut. You can practically hear the teenage girls swooning. And the follow-up offers rolling in.“I’m trying not to think about things like that,” Fearn blushes. “I’ll be filming another movie when Finding Emily comes out, so my head’s gonna be very much in that. And I think that’s probably a good thing.”We’re meeting at a café in London’s Holborn, Fearn swaddled in a Polo Ralph Lauren hoodie. He’s lived in the capital since 2022, when he figured he may as well make a go of things career-wise. He’d worked on some short films, cameoed as a Gotham City hoodlum in The Batman (“You’ll blink and you’ll miss me,” he jokes), and played one of the older lads hanging around and playing pool with Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio in Aftersun. A role as a doomed space teen in Alien: Romulus followed, then as Emma Mackey’s stoner flibbertigibbet brother in last year’s starry James L Brooks comedy Ella McCay.Looking for love: Fearn and Angourie Rice in ‘Finding Emily’ (Focus Features)Swapping the open fields and suburbs of Coalville for London has changed his outlook on life. “I’m kind of addicted to the noise of the city a little bit,” he says. “But I do think about going back to live in a more quiet place, too. I haven’t really worked out what I want yet. But I guess that’s the exciting part of life – not really knowing where you’re gonna end up.”Fearn took acting and improvisation classes as a teenager at the Television Workshop in Nottingham, the training ground for stars including Jack O’Connell, Samantha Morton and Vicky McClure. That led to a short film directed by Charlotte Reagan – who’d go on to make the Harris Dickinson movie Scrapper – and then his first feature, a coming-of-age comedy called Sweetheart. “I didn’t think about building anything at that point,” he says. “Like all I thought about was what I was gonna have for dinner that night, or what me and my mates were gonna do on the weekend.”Aftersun was the first project that made him want to turn acting into a legitimate career. “I was only out there [in Turkey] for a small period of time, but watching Paul and Frankie and [director] Charlotte Wells… I was, like, yes – I wanna be a part of what they’re doing. I’m gonna chase those kinds of movies. I want to be as close to that as possible.”And now, three years later, he’s leading Finding Emily. He plays a struggling musician in Manchester who meets the girl of his dreams in a bar – she tells him her first name but accidentally gives him the wrong number, so he sets out to find her, allied with another Emily (this one played by Angourie Rice, of Mare of Easttown and the Mean Girls musical) he meets on his search. In the midst of our present day romcom drought, particularly ones set in Britain, Finding Emily is a breath of fresh air, rammed with sweetness, sincerity and real, actual jokes that land. It’s a minor miracle.“I felt really safe on the set,” Fearn says. “It was a big responsibility playing that character, and singing, too – I’d only ever sung in the shower, you know?” He and Rice, who’s been acting since she was 11, had each other’s backs throughout production. “She’s been doing this forever, and made sure I always felt included, and not overwhelmed by it all. It was a real team effort.”Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 dayNew subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.Try for freeADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 dayNew subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.Try for freeADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.Star-studded: Fearn and Ayo Edebiri in last year’s James L Brooks comedy ‘Ella McCay’ (20th Century Studios)Fearn has the slight argh-there’s-a-dictaphone-in-front-of-me reticence of a newly minted rising star, feeling more at ease asking me questions than answering them himself. Ask him about the mores of Gen Z dating, or Reese Witherspoon’s theory – shared on a podcast last year – that young people need romcoms to teach them what to do and what not to do in love, and he clams up. Ask him about movies he loves, though, and he’s an open book. He loves the Soho repertory cinema The Prince Charles. He likes to discover a star and then watch everything he can get his hands on that they’re in, namechecking Ethan Hawke, Al Pacino and Jennifer Lawrence as the subjects of recent filmographic rabbit holes he’s gone down. And his romcom Mount Rushmore? Notting Hill, Crazy Stupid Love, the cult Cillian Murphy/Lucy Liu vehicle Watching the Detectives, and April’s wedding-nightmare comedy The Drama (“That’s a romcom, right?” he asks. “Ish?”)Letterboxd, the popular film-logging site, is a no-no for him, though. As is social media in general. “Nah, I just watch the movie and then speak to my friends about it,” he laughs. “That’s my Letterboxd: talking.” He intends to keep his private life on lockdown, by the way. “I don’t want to be uploading pictures of my spaghetti, you know? I just want to act and have the work speak for itself. I don’t want people to have an idea about me from my Instagram.”His actual goal, if you can believe it, involves your dad. “I wanna be the kind of actor where people’s dads go, ‘Who’s that?’, or like ‘ooh, he’s a good actor’.”People’s dads, I ask?“Yeah,” he says. “‘cause dads always know what’s up, don’t they?”‘Finding Emily’ is in UK cinemas, and will be released in the US on 28 August