Donald Glover knows I’m standing outside his house. He has seen me scale the three punishing sets of steps it takes to reach his house high in the hills overlooking Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighbourhood. He’s aware someone is scheduled to show up and interview him at the exact time I’m pressing his buzzer and knocking on his door. But it takes an email and phone call to his publicist to get him to open it. “Sorry,” he murmurs,” I saw you out there and I wasn’t sure whether you lived around here.”

We’re meeting ostensibly to discuss his small but pivotal role in Ridley Scott’s Castaway-in-space movie, The Martian, but Glover is an abstract and free-associative conversationalist. We sink into outsize brown beanbags in a white room filled with computers, keyboards and guitars, and he gestures to the window and his enviable view of the cloudless sky and the cityscape stitching out to infinity.

“One of the reasons I really like living here [is] there’s no advertising,” he says. “The billboards don’t reach that high.” Referring to his armoury of musical hard- and software, he says: “I have a laboratory and I make stuff and put it out when I want.”

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In an era when the majority of popular artists are in the brand-building business, Donald Glover is refreshingly hard to pin down. Since graduating college in 2006, the 31-year-old native of Stone Mountain, Georgia, has been a YouTube comedy star, a writer on the 30 Rock team, a stand-up comic, a cast member of the critically adored sitcom Community, a Grammy-nominated rapper for his Childish Gambino alias, a director (of the hilariously pretentious silent short film Clapping For The Wrong Reasons) and now an actor-for-hire with an increasingly lengthy Hollywood resumé.

Tina Fey was such a special person. She had her own era at Saturday Night Live and that’s so hard to do

I ask about the difference between his current situation as master of his own creative universe and his early days in New York writing for Tina Fey on 30 Rock. “It was the only thing I had ever really, really wanted,” he recalls. “Tina Fey was such a special person. She had her own era at Saturday Night Live and that’s so hard to do, especially as a woman. I wanted to be her shadow. I wanted to be her protege. I’ve never had to think as hard as I did on that show. Late at night, I’d be sitting at my computer thinking, ‘What’s the funniest way to say this?’ She’d be shooting all day while we were writing and then we’d meet back at her house and write late into the night. One time, I almost passed out because I was so tired.”

Concurrent with that exhaustive job, the 23-year-old version of Glover had numerous other outlets for his creativity. “I would come home and make music and then go do stand-up. With Derrick [his sketch comedy troupe] we made stuff for YouTube, and on the weekends I’d DJ. I don’t really know what drove me. Interest in things. The feeling that it was possible to do those things.”

I point out to Glover that he was raised a Jehovah’s Witness (“Really? I didn’t know”) and ask what it was like growing up deprived of all the pop culture in which he would later immerse himself. Did he feel like the weird kid at school? “I felt like I was living in a different world,” he says. “Kids were talking about Halloween and Santa Claus and I was like, ‘Santa Claus isn’t real, when you die, you die, there’s no heaven.’ But it’s not like I was converting people, they were like, ‘No, Santa Claus is real, he just doesn’t come to your house.’ If you asked anyone there, they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, Donald was cool.’ But I felt alone. It showed up in my work. People would wonder why my plays, poems, songs or whatever were all so sad.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Troy story: Donald Glover in Community. Photograph: Getty

Television was mostly banned from the Glover house, and his mother dismissed all forms of contemporary music as the gateway to Satan worship. Does he experience any pangs of envy when looking at the way the likes of Jaden and Willow Smith are encouraged by their parents to grow up as weird black kids, whereas he never was? “I think it’s dope that they have that, but I’d be terrified. When you have parents who are supportive of everything, what do you do when you’re in your rebellious stage? I guess you can rebel against society but when everything is accepted, what is truly accepted?”

Donald Glover’s own act of public rebellion happened in 2013 when he left the role of the childlike Troy Barnes on Community at the start of its fifth season to concentrate on Childish Gambino. Rap critics may have derided Glover for his perceived softness, inauthenticity and TV background – all accusations that could have been equally levelled at Drake – but Gambino’s growing popularity allowed him a creative freedom he wasn’t getting in his day job. Glover had dropped a heavy hint that he was tiring of the sitcom grind on the 2012 song We Ain’t Them from the Royalty mixtape, on which he stated, “Back of my mind, though, I hope the show gets cancelled.” But on a series of emotional confessions scribbled on hotel room notepaper and posted on Instagram, Glover would claim: “I didn’t leave Community to rap. I don’t wanna rap. I want to be on my own.” How does he feel now? “I’m right at the point where I understand all the stuff I have to offer in terms of culture and art. I’m strong enough now where I know I’m good at this but there’s so much confusion going on and I’d rather just watch. My job is working out what people are trying to get at.”

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When I ask Glover if he would return to Community – if they made the much-talked-about movie version – he acts as if I just whipped out a contract and a pen and waved it under his nose. “I don’t know. I wish I could answer definitively, but that always gets you into trouble… as a human being… time only goes one way… if you’re going to make a promise… so much can change.”

He seems as if he’s about to burrow inside the beanbag, such is his discomfort with the subject, so conversation turns towards The Martian. Glover’s brilliant, socially awkward astrodynamicist Rich Purnell plays a crucial part in bringing stranded botanist Matt Damon back from Mars, where his fellow astronauts accidentally left him for dead. “He comes up with a plan,” says Glover. “I was happy to get that role. It’s a cool concept and it’s the type of movie I like where it’s in the real world, kind of, and the stakes are high, but it’s also small at the same time. It has funny people in it and funny moments. I thought, ‘I’m definitely not going to get this,’ because, at the time, I was still doing a lot of music but my whole perspective was, if I’m going to start doing this again, I’ve got to do it the way I did 30 Rock: you work with people who are really good and you get really good. I’ll hang out with Soderbergh and Channing [on Magic Mike XXL, in which Glover disrobed, recited poetry and sang Bruno Mars’s Marry You] and see how they work and I’ll do the same with Ridley Scott. I looked on it as schooling.”

Glover is currently devoting the majority of his time to Atlanta, the comedy he will write and play the lead in. I tell him I know it’s about a former native of the city returning to its vibrant music scene. “Atlanta’s really a metaphor for something bigger,” he corrects me. “I just want to talk about nature in a bigger sense. Not just birds and bees but the nature of things, like the nature of us.” Is that how he pitched it to the network? “I wish I could have sold it that way,” he muses. “A lot of people don’t see the place the way I see it. It’s a real musical mecca now and it’s a character. They way people say, ‘I’m a Noo Yorker’, or, ‘I’m from LA’, now they say, ‘I’m from Atlanta.’”

I point out that HBO also has a show about the Atlanta music scene, entitled Brothers In Atlanta. Glover assumes the foetal position on the beanbag. “The guys that are doing it are friends of mine! There will be similarities but the styles will be drastically different. Anyway, we both have Empire to worry about.”

And then he looks out at his endless view, lost in his thoughts. I remain on my beanbag with a couple of my own. I may not like everything Donald Glover produces – for example, I prefer Childish Gambino when he’s melodic and melancholy, as on the recent Sober, to his more frenetic, punchline-filled material – but it makes a change to spend time with someone who treats their career as an adventure rather than a to-do list. I also find myself wondering if he’s going to remember to let me out.

The Martian is out on 30 September