At the end of the day, the walls begin closing in. The hotel suite shrinks, the armchair pinches and the harried performer has been at rest for too long. Round and round the room he prowls, like an animal exploring the limits of its cage, looping at intervals behind the couch where I’m sat. He’s raking his hair. He’s scratching his beard. It turns out that there’s one prospect more unnerving than having Michael Shannon in your field of vision. It’s having him behind you, conceivably preparing to pounce.

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If you need an embodiment of all-American madness, Shannon is your man. He plays cracked saints and tragic monsters: the broken maths prodigy in Revolutionary Road, the remorseless mafia killer in The Iceman. The camera feasts on his lumberjack frame, his intense, bug-eyed stare, the sense that he’s unstable ordnance, about to explode. And yet Shannon’s great skill is in holding the tensions. Cast him as the villain and he exhibits pathos and humanity. Install him as the hero and he carries a distinct whiff of danger.

His latest film, Midnight Special, is a case in point. He plays a ruthless kidnapper, dragging an eight-year-boy between cheap motels with the authorities in hot pursuit. But first appearances are misleading: it transpires the child is his son, possessed of unearthly powers. A religious cult regards the boy as the messiah; the Pentagon, by contrast, plans to weaponise him. Shannon’s dad is desperate, exhausted and thrumming with violence. For all that, he may just be on the side of the angels.

His prowling complete, the actor returns to the chair and cracks open a bottle of water. He explains that he is in town for only a few hours. He flew in this morning; he flies out tonight. “But that’s OK. I saw the lions. I saw the palace. One day in London, that isn’t so bad.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In Midnight Special. Photograph: Ben Rothstein/Warner Bros

Midnight Special marks Shannon’s fourth collaboration with writer-director Jeff Nichols (a fifth, Loving, is tipped to premiere at Cannes this year). He says he loves working with Nichols because it hardly feels like acting at all, and that he relishes the themes the director explores. The pull of blood ties. The parent-child relationship. “The kid gives a father a sense of purpose and identity,” he explains. “But what the kid ultimately does is become something other than you. He’s going to transform. The caterpillar is going to become the butterfly. And I loved the notion that the kid is literally full of light. Because that’s what children are, full of light, and they don’t know how to control it. Or sometimes they don’t get to keep it. It gets taken away.” He snorts at his presumption. “I mean, I don’t want to get too heavy about it. The more I’m talking, the less I’m making this sound like a science-fiction movie.”

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Sci-fi or not, the film resonated with him; he has children of his own. Sylvie is seven and Marion is two. “And actually my second daughter was born right before I started shooting. We live in New York and I had to go down to New Orleans the week after, which was hard, but I think it probably informed the performance. I mean, I never thought I was capable of being a father. But I also never wanted to be one of those parents who leaves the kids with the nanny. But it can be tricky sometimes. The work takes you all over.”

His own childhood sounds positively discombobulating. Shannon’s parents divorced when he was small and each went on to remarry five times while their son bounced between his mother’s home in Kentucky and his father’s up in Evanston, Illinois. As an adolescent, he was booked in for sessions with a child psychologist and reputedly responded by trashing the man’s office. Acting, he allows, was an outlet for his angst, even a form of self-therapy, if only up to a point.

He glares at the ground, rakes again at his beard. “I don’t think that acting necessarily fixes your problems. To me it’s a job. Whatever my personal situation is, if I can extricate myself from it and say, ‘OK, I’m Bob or Tom or whatever’ then that’s great and you can get lots of attention. But then you come home at the end of the day and find that you’re still a trainwreck as a human being. That’s the big problem with seeing acting as therapy.”

Besides, he adds, he was always more into music than acting. He recalls seeing the video for Talking Heads’ And She Was on MTV in his teens and feeling that his mind had been blown. He reveres Thelonious Monk more than he does any film-maker. He even writes and sings in his own band, Corporal, playing restrained, accomplished folk rock that rather belies his volcanic screen work. “And I always say I’d like more time to write songs, I’m too busy to write songs. But maybe I’m lying, maybe I’m lazy. Because I do have the time. I mean I had time on the flight over here. I could have written some songs. Instead I sat watching bad movies.”

Landing in Chicago at the end of his teens, he founded his own theatre and performed with the Steppenwolf company. On screen he cropped up in the likes of 8 Mile, Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys II before that Oscar-nominated turn in 2008’s Revolutionary Road pushed him centre-stage. After that he hit his stride, playing a turncoat G-man in Boardwalk Empire, the satanic property mogul in the excellent 99 Homes and the late-period Elvis Presley, who wings into the White House in the upcoming Elvis and Nixon, desperate to be anointed as a federal drugs agent (“Who knows why he did it?” Shannon says. “There are a whole lot theories. None of them totally add up”). All the same, I think I love him best as hair-trigger Curtis in Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter. Curtis spies portents of apocalypse in the movement of sparrows. He goes off like a bomb at the Lions Club dinner. It’s a performance for the ages; a thing of fierce glory. Peer too closely at Curtis and he risks peering back into you.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest As Elvis with Kevin Spacey as Nixon in the forthcoming Elvis and Nixon.

Shannon has his doubts. “Oh no, I’m not one of those people who get tangled up his parts. If anything I don’t take it seriously enough. I envy someone like Daniel Day-Lewis. Makes one movie every three years, gets totally lost in the part and then everybody says it’s the greatest thing ever. I’ve never had that experience and I don’t really know why.”

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He mulls it over. “I guess there’s something uneasy about me. I guess I’m definitely in touch with uneasiness. So maybe that’s the thing. Maybe I’m always in such a state of complete and utter turmoil that I only notice it when I’m working.” He gropes for his water. “Now you’ve got me all self-conscious.”

But perhaps there’s a more mundane explanation. Put bluntly, might it be that his career owes as much to his appearance as it does to his talent? On film (in person?), he’s a corn-fed galoot with a riptide of chaos. If he looked like Tom Cruise, he would have been offered different roles.

Shannon shoots me such a scowl that I fear I’ve offended him. He thinks I’m here to debunk the mystique of great acting. Then he guffaws and the tension breaks. “Oh please do,” he says. “You could do us all a big favour. And yeah, it’s a visual medium. It’s motion pictures. So basically you’re just a model that talks. Look at any actor nowadays – they’re just models. Going to the Oscars is like going to the prom. Everybody dressed up. It used to be that when you went to the Oscars, you’d pick up something nice from the mall. Now it’s this big hoo-ha. It’s off the fucking rails. Even with me, when I do some press conference, some designer will say they want to put their suit on me. Put their suit on me! I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be hearing that phrase.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest As Rick Carver in 99 Homes. Photograph: Allstar/Broad Green Pictures

Life, he admits, is chaotic, confounding; in good ways and bad. Every fork in the road has taken him by surprise. Every restless movement has carried him somewhere new. His career, it’s fair to say, has surpassed his expectations. “Oh yeah, definitely. I can’t begin to explain it. Free drinks on the plane. Life of Riley.” He says “I’m from Kentucky”, as though this explains everything. “I’m from Kentucky and when I was a kid I’d go out in the backyard and there was a creek at the end. I’d stand waist-deep in the creek and catch crawdads with my hands. And now look at me. Look at how crazy life is. Drinking bottles of perfectly still water inside a five-star London hotel.”

So fair enough and well done him. And yet, if Shannon’s roles tell us anything, it’s that the world is unstable and contains as much darkness as light. I ask if that means life is better these days and he grins like the wolf in a kids’ fairytale. “Aha,” he says. “No comment, no comment.”

Midnight Special is released in the UK on 8 April