It was around four o’clock in the afternoon when Shane Meadows had a bright idea. While shooting The Virtues, his new Channel 4 series, the director was trying to film two pivotal scenes back to back. “Shane being Shane, things didn’t work out,” says Stephen Graham, who is telling me about the director’s laissez-faire approach in the back room of a Camden pub.

When the first scene over-ran, Meadows came up with a novel way to keep the other scene’s extras happy. “They decided to give them a free bar,” says Graham. “So OK – free bar. That would have been all right for a couple of hours. But we didn’t get there until 8.30pm. We turn up and they’re all shit-faced. Shane went, ‘Shit. What do we do?’ I said, ‘Go for it.’ That’s the thing – that kind of adrenaline, being on the edge and seeing how far you can push things. We just went for it.”

The result is classic Meadows and Graham: a portrait of working-class life that is volatile and feral yet strangely beautiful, as Graham’s character Joseph instigates – and then tries to avoid being caught up in – the increasingly unhinged melee. As often happens to Graham in a Meadows project, the chaos is impossible to avoid and triggers a chain of events that take Joseph to Ireland in search of his estranged sister and the truth about a childhood trapped in a brutal care system.

Bracing stuff … Graham and Shea Michael Shaw in The Virtues. Photograph: Dean Rogers/Channel 4

The Virtues could be the pair’s most bracing work yet, which is saying something. They first worked together on This Is England, initially on the 2006 film and then on the TV series, which ran for three seasons on Channel 4 and told the story of a group of Midlands skinheads-turned-ravers in the 1980s and beyond. It was on the set of the film that Meadows firstmentioned his idea for The Virtues. “It’s not completely autobiographical,” says Graham, “but there are elements of Joseph that are me and Shane combined. We’ve all had our own bits of darkness: self-doubt, fear, self-loathing. I know I have. My family and friends have pulled me through.”

Graham, who is 45, has used that darkness to create some of the most harrowing performances on British TV in the last decade. He teamed up with Jimmy McGovern on Accused, where he was involved in a murderous affair with Sean Bean, who played a transvestite called Tracie; he starred as a detective in Little Boy Blue, based on the murder of 11-year-old Liverpool boy Rhys Jones; and last year, he played a suspected paedophile in Lennie James’s critical hit Save Me, a complex drama about a missing child.

Most recently, he’s been on screen as John Corbett, a rogue undercover police officer, in Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty, which thundered to a conclusion last night. Things didn’t work out too well for Graham’s character there, either: Corbett had his throat slit while trying to unearth police corruption. “Jed used to be a doctor, so he advises you,” says Graham. “I asked him if I should make some noise and he said, ‘No, you kind of drown on the blood in the back of your neck.’ Yeah, I thought it was superb. I’m good at dying.”

Snarling star … as undercover officer John Corbett in Line of Duty. Photograph: Aidan Monaghan/BBC/World Productions

Graham’s acting career started in his parents’ front room in Kirkby, on the outskirts of Liverpool, where he’d do impressions of Idi Amin, former dictator of Uganda, and Margaret Thatcher. While playing Jim Hawkins in a school production of Treasure Island, he was spotted by local actor Andrew Schofield (who was Johnny Rotten in Alex Cox’s 1986 film Sid and Nancy). Graham joined Liverpool’s Everyman Youth Theatre, then moved to London.

It was then that he had his darkest moment. At the age of 21, living away from home for the first time, he found himself dealing with a double dose of grief. “My nana had not long passed and my mum had lost my brother. She had a stillbirth. My little brother – he was such a special little angel that he never got to see this place. He was too precious for this Earth. That’s the way I try and fathom it.”

Graham got a fortuitous bit part in Guy Ritchie short The Hard Case: he went along to support a friend, but was asked to audition. This planted the seed for his breakthrough as Tommy, the cockney wide boy and dog enthusiast in Ritchie’s Snatch, starring Brad Pitt and Benicio del Toro. Martin Scorsese was impressed and cast Graham in Gangs of New York, which led to him playing two real-life gangsters: Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire and Baby Face Nelson in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. He has a part in Scorsese’s forthcoming film The Irishman, but for Graham – who lives in the sleepy Leicestershire village of Ibstock with his wife, Hannah Walters, and two children – it’s British drama that interests him the most.

I love England but it's going to the shit a bit

“Is it a conscious decision that I do these, what shall we call them, working-class projects?” says Graham. “No. But the writing resonates with me. They’re the sort of stories I saw as a kid. I saw Boys from the Blackstuff, I saw Play for Today, I saw Made in Britain.” He’s drawn to “real stories about real people”, who are often living on the edges of society: marginalised, rejected and frequently very, very angry.

None more so than Andrew “Combo” Gascoigne, the fascist skinhead in This Is England. Playing the part was traumatic for Graham, who is mixed race (his paternal grandfather is Jamaican and he suffered racial abuse when growing up in Liverpool). He began drinking to cope with the stress, admitted to becoming lost in the character, and struggled to get work afterwards. Then last year, adding insult to injury, far-right groups began to use Combo’s image in social media posts.

“To take something I created and use that as an image for their views and opinions is a load of wank,” he says. “And if they’d properly looked into what I was trying to do – he was mixed race anyway. He was. I am.” Graham doesn’t regret taking the role, but is frustrated that the nuanced portrayal of self-loathing failed to register with some people.

‘He wasn’t some far-out neo-Nazi’ … Graham as skinhead Combo in This Is England. Photograph: Allstar/Optimum Releasing

“He wasn’t some far-out neo-Nazi,” says the actor. “He was confused. Like a lot of young people at that time, he got carried away. He had more reason to try and justify his actions because of his heritage, which he was fighting against more than anything. It was more about the psychology of why he was like that.”

There is something more than a bit nuanced about Graham, too. Yes, he counts Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese as mates, but he rarely works in Hollywood these days. He likes village life: he helps run his son’s football team and is a regular face in the Co-op. “I don’t want to be sitting on Palm Beach or driving down thingy boulevard,” he says. “It’s not for me.”

Really? He wouldn’t rather be in a mid-century house in LA’s hipster hotspot Silver Lake? “No, not really. I’d rather be in my shitty little BMW X5, which I bought off a stuntman and is falling apart. But that’s just me. I love England. It’s going to the shit a bit, but I love the people in this country.”

Street-fighting man … Graham, far right, with Leonardo DiCaprio in Gangs of New York. Photograph: Miramax/Sportsphoto/Allstar

Before we talk, Graham helps the Guardian’s photographer tidy up after he’s taken his shots, stops for a selfie with a workman, and tells me to move my chair forward so people in the pub don’t have to squeeze past. He seems genuinely concerned about the welfare of everyone around him, which could be a holdover from his days as a youth worker in Liverpool, a job he considered going back to during his post-This Is England career lull.

He thinks the decline of British youth clubs is a disgrace (almost half of London’s have closed since 2011). “People are so quick to blame the youth and point the finger. Well, what the fuck would you do then?” he asks, revealing the first hints of the snarl and bite his characters often have. “If you want to create a society where people feel respect for themselves, part of something, like functional members of society, you have to give them empowerment. You have to, or that’s where the likes of your Combos come from.”

Referring to Joseph in The Virtues, he says: “I don’t think any kid is born evil. What if you’ve got this great little life – a nuclear family like what I’ve got, a lovely environment – and things beyond your control happen and take that away? Then you’re put into this care system. It’s all beyond your control. Do we blame those things? Do we try to understand?”

Graham’s inquisitive, zen-like approach to his characters might be informed by his new-found spirituality. He insists he’s not religious, but refers to himself as a “spiritual scally”. “It works for me,” he says. “I meditate. You wouldn’t think someone like me would do that, would you? I do reiki. It’s like taking a load of magic mushrooms – without taking the magic mushrooms. It’s trippy, that reiki shit. I get a lot from it. When you do it properly – wooosh! I’m not embarrassed about it. I’m not 21 any more. If you don’t like it, tough shit.”

• The Virtues starts on 15 May at 9pm on Channel 4.