With nominations for the EE Rising Star Award looming, James McAvoy, the inaugural winner of the prize, tells how he broke into acting by chance.

Was acting your first love?

No! Acting was something that came out of nowhere really. A director gave me an audition out of the blue. I'd never done drama classes. I'd never even done kiddie drama or anything, so it was a fairly left-field thing.

Drama school was responsible for making me really love acting. I went to drama school not even certain that I wanted to be an actor - quite foolish. But luckily it instilled in me a real love for acting. I'm kinda lucky really to find something that I ended up loving, even though I'd never really considered doing it beforehand.

Congratulations on the Scottish Bafta for Filth - an amazing movie

Thanks. You're very, very kind.

You were the first winner of the EE rising star award. why is it so important for young actors?

It's voted for by the people, and I like that a lot. You get your peers who put you in there, and then they hand it over to the people who actually go to the cinema, so you get a really true representation. It's not just who the industry think is good and needs to be celebrated and lauded, but you also get a sort of hard facts and figures based on the audience.

At the end of the day, awards ceremonies are not designed to be a boost to people's careers - they're celebrations of work. What's also nice about the [EE] Rising Star Award is it's not even a celebration of one gig, it's a celebration of a body of work, which is something that only usually happens for older actors, and the people who have been much more in the fabric of the industry, but for a young actor to get celebrated for a body of work that has been taking place over a year or a couple of years, is actually really nice, you know? So it's a cool award and I'm really glad it's still going strong.

One of your pending movies is Victor Frankenstein. As the eponymous lead, how do you approach a role so iconic?

Just the same as always really. You've got to figure out what you think the story is, identify what you think everyone expects to see, how much of that you decide you're going to give them, and then how much you're going to do different.

The script actually does a fair old bit of that for us - the script concentrates on the relationship between Dr Frankenstein and the character who isn't even in the book, on Igor [Daniel Radcliffe], so that's the main central crux of the story. It's gonna be a different character than the one who was obsessed with creating flesh.

Next year is the 10th anniversary of the EE Rising Star Award, the only accolade at the EE BAFTAs voted for by the British public. Nominees will be announced and voting will open on Wednesday, January 7, 2015.