“So the first day was the pit of snakes,” says Joel Edgerton, of starting work on Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods And Kings, playing Ramses opposite Christian Bale’s Moses. “I mean, talk about a baptism of fire! It was my first day on the movie, which to me is always like the first day at a new school. And it’s my first day with Christian, and I’m a bit nervous about working with him. Y’know, I gotta step up to the fucking plate with Christian Bale and prove my mettle on the first minute of day one. And, just to make it all perfect, I have to do all this with a 10-foot fucking Burmese python around my neck! It’s sliding up my face like this” – he makes that Kristin Wiig dicks-in-the-face face from Bridesmaids – “and it’s a constrictor-type snake, so it could easily have just throttled me there and then, if it felt like it. But there was a snake-wrangler to, I dunno, stab it or something, just in case!” Edgerton emits a loud, dirty gurgle at the memory.

This animated raconteur, instantly friendly and hospitable, modest and approachable, couldn’t be more different from the vain, mercurial, malevolent pharaoh-to-be he plays in Exodus, bald as an egg and clad in outfits made mostly of gold. Newly hirsute, he’s happy to discourse at length on his director’s on-set idiosyncrasies.

Life on a Ridley Scott movie, he says, is a bit like being in a huge battle, “except you already know you’re on the winning side and that your general likes you personally. And he’s a geordie, so he’s not a big man for compliments – very dry. I was caught on a runaway chariot one day, and I was shitting myself. One of the reins broke and that took all control of the horses out of our hands. We were on an old disused freeway, with all this camera equipment and cranes and shit, and the horses just sped right up, and I’m thinking: ‘Oh shit, Joel’s on a fuckin’ runaway chariot!’ And one of the horses reared up after a bit and it all slowed down finally, but y’know, it was pretty terrifying there for a minute or two. And Ridley, after it was all under control again, comes over. Now a normal director would be all, ‘Are you all right?’ Ridley just comes over, sniffs the air and says: ‘Do I smell shit around here?’ Like I’d just soiled my pants! No soft landing with Ridley!”

Exodus: Gods And Kings looks stunning, if perhaps overly CGI-based. Scott’s characteristic obsessiveness over period detail and his consummate sense of production design and art direction on an epic, widescreen scale are all fully in evidence. Vast Egyptian valleys, seen from a godlike aerial perspective, teem with warring, colliding, thrashing, chariot-borne armies, while at the earthbound level, no plane of focus is left unfilled with period trinkets, weapons, dwellings, pyramids, sphinxes, the works. The 10 plagues of Egypt are the strongest moments, and Scott doesn’t hold back on his rivers of blood, locust storms, frog infestations and the like. The battle scenes are furiously complex, crowded and intense, while the parting of the Red Sea, featuring looming walls of water the equal of those in Interstellar, demonstrate that Ridley Scott is still content with his outsize, panoramic approach to film-making. Equally, however, his tendency to pillage and plagiarise his own work – principally Gladiator’s plot (itself borrowed from The Fall Of The Roman Empire, Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments) – remains intact. As does his determination to cram every era of history, particularly military history, into whatever period he’s working in, no matter how obvious the anachronisms.

There is much in the film that finds an echo in the present day: warring Middle Eastern antagonists, oppressed peoples, irascible tyrants who think they are gods. Scott says that one of his themes “is how we don’t learn a thing from our history, and keep on doing the same evil, stupid shit down the centuries”. The controversy over lily-white actors playing Egyptian roles had not yet arisen when I met Scott and Edgerton, but recent defensive yet characteristically unapologetic remarks by Fox boss Rupert Murdoch suggest that he isn’t about to tinker with a story with potentially massive popularity among America’s rightwing Christian fundamentalists.

Edgerton paints Ramses in an instant, the way great actors can. He has a slightly rounded, apple-cheeked, impish face, an impression amplified in the movie by his baldness. You feel, with his squinting eyes and curled lips, he could make a career of playing ratfinks, killers and creeps; characters spring-loaded with the promise of violence and menace. The man himself, though, couldn’t be more different. He bounds out of his chair, big smile, friendly handshake. So open, warm and enjoyably talkative is Edgerton that soon enough we might as well be two blokes in beach chairs drinking tinnies and wiggling our toes in the warm, wet Bondi sand.

Joel Edgerton. Photograph: Kirk Edwards

Poised suddenly for success – big roles in Anton Corbijn’s Life, and Boston crime drama Black Mass are upcoming – Edgerton reminisces about being a movie dunce when he first got to acting school. “I came out of high school where my heroes were like, Michael Jordan and a lot of local rugby players – and on the movie front it was Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. I knew nothing! Then at 17, I go to drama school and suddenly I discover Al Pacino and this huge fucking smörgåsbord of Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather… then I’m stumbling on all these great Sam Peckinpah movies, and I suddenly understood what acting was actually about. I mean, Gene Hackman was a superstar in the 70s – with that face! Donald Sutherland, Dustin Hoffman!”

But he wasn’t a complete naif. “I knew enough to get into drama school, after all. I mean, I wasn’t auditioning for them with a monologue from Rambo, although that would have been fucking hilarious! Have an M16 and a red headband and oil up yer fuckin’ chest!” He emits a succession of Sly-style animal grunts, intermingled with his infectious gurgling laugh. “No, no, I did a Hamlet speech, I had some brains.”

Edgerton must be the only Aussie export thesp never to have apprenticed on Neighbours or Home And Away. He says his career has been “a succession of small baby steps” and that’s the way he likes it. He made his way first in Australian TV, theatre and movies. Then, after the career turning-point that was Animal Kingdom, directed by his friend David Michôd, he segued gradually into large-scale Hollywood productions. In the meantime, he has kept his hand in with the Blue-Tongue group, a collective of friends and collaborators who aid each other in all areas of production on smaller-scale movies which they write, direct and act in together. “I’m a great believer in not sitting around waiting for the right part to come around, but jumping in and building it for yourself,” he says. Michôd is the group’s daddy figure, but Joel wrote and starred in The Square (directed by his brother Nash) and he wrote, produced and co-starred in Felony, directed by another Blue-Tonguer, Matthew Saville. “It’s not a mafia or anything,” he adds. “More a group of people reading each other’s scripts, acting for one another, or just offering healthy, useful criticism.”

Christian Bale and Joel in Exodus. Photograph: REX

Edgerton has kept in touch with Animal Kingdom’s other breakout stars, its gangster matriarch Jacki Weaver and its oddball psycho Ben Mendelsohn (also in Exodus). Weaver in particular is much venerated by Edgerton’s generation, as an actor who went from riotous early-70s “ocker” nudie sex comedies such as Alvin Purple and Stork straight into some of the classics of the emergent Australian new wave; movies like Petersen and Caddie. Edgerton reminds me that for a long while in the 80s and early 90s she couldn’t get work. As he triumphantly notes, this is no longer the case: “I keep getting texts from her saying things like, ‘Here’s me with De Niro!’ or, ‘Just now going in to dinner with Obama!’”

In fact, Edgerton has known and worked with the cream of Australia’s acting talent. Heath Ledger was a friend, and Edgerton remembers learning of his death, “while I was waiting for my Vegemite toast in a cafe. I saw the words on the TV – ‘Heath Ledger Dead in New York’ – and I thought: ‘That’s a bloody weird thing to write down.’ It wouldn’t register.” And he played Stanley Kowalski to Cate Blanchett’s Blanche DuBois onstage in Sydney – perfect casting. “You get a job like that and you know that every day on the job is gonna be amazing. I’d seen Cate in about four plays when I was a drama student, and the electricity coming off that woman is phenomenal. And I then have to browbeat her onstage every night! One night, if you read the reports, I’m supposed to have thrown a Bakelite radio at her head. Course, I didn’t mean it intentionally, but it resulted in the loss of a lot of blood and the early termination of that night’s performance, but anyway…”

It’s a measure of the man that she instantly forgave him.

Exodus: Gods And Kings is in cinemas from Boxing Day