Former super-nerd fit for comic-book villainy

DUDE, this movie is like totally awesome, 'cos you totally enter the mind of this teen geek.

Actor Jason Schwartzman poses as he arrives at the European Premiere of his latest film 'Scott Pilgrim vs The World' at Leicester Square in London, 18/08/2010.

DUDE, this movie is like totally awesome, 'cos you totally enter the mind of this teen geek.

And there are, uh, like, these seven evil dudes he's gotta fight before he can chillax and hook up with this chick with pink hair, yeah?

Welcome to the limited vocabulary and fascinating mindset of Scott Pilgrim vs the World, a sweetly funny coming-of-age film that straddles the world between video games and reality in the same way Kick-Ass fleshed out the superhero comic world.

This is a new cinema genre for a computer-shackled generation that grew up with the multi-layered scenarios of gaming, where stories can run backwards or forwards in parallel worlds.

Scott Pilgrim began as a series of graphic novels, and its style requires a new breed of comedy actor: a set of solipsistic Woody Allens for the age of Wii. Super-nerdy Scott (played by Michael Cera), whose brain is fried on gaming, falls in love with the pink-haired punkette Ramona Flowers and then discovers he has to fight (ninja-style) with her seven evil ex-lovers, each one a separate nightmare: the skateboarding film star, the vegan rock guitarist, the oleaginous music promoter.

Scott's arch-nemesis is the evil promoter Gideon Gordon Graves, played with slimy relish by Jason Schwartzman in an appalling

white jacket, red shirt and a floppy French bob: a look already being copied by costumed fans at comic conferences.

It's another peculiar role for Schwartzman. He first appeared in Wes Anderson's Rushmore, followed by I Heart Huckabees and The Darjeeling Limited, and more recently played the needy son in Fantastic Mr Fox.

Schwartzman, a rather teenage 31, is in London to explain the pleasures of playing the comic bad guy. He eschews the Soho Hotel's plush furniture and sits on the floor. He has a daggy Beatle moustache and haircut, and is wearing a hoodie zipped to the neck.

Schwartzman turned up towards the end of the six-month Scott Pilgrim shoot in Toronto to take up his sword as Gideon. The director, Edgar Wright, "showed me this crudely edited stuff of all the battles with the six previous evil exes, and even without proper sound and people shouting 'bang', I knew it was extraordinary. I started panicking. What if I was miscast? I felt very insecure." He grins: "I could see the movie that I could now destroy."

Wright is the British director of the cult comedies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and he said one thing to Schwartzman: "Gideon is the ultimate passive aggressive person." So they did each shot up to three times, with a different scale of passive aggression, from one for nicey-nice up to 10 for brutal undermining. Then they mixed them all up, "so Gideon smiles a lot but seems very unstable, like standing on a lily pad". Schwartzman also wore women's underwear (supposedly Ramona's) under his white suit "to stay in character".

A skinny 168cm, Schwartzman can do the psycho Napoleonic schtick rather well. "I never cared about my height. All the actors I ever met were small. It's not really about being six feet tall. It's about bringing joy." He's perfectly serious, and he knows about acting: his mother is an actress, his uncle is Francis Ford Coppola, he's also related to Nicolas Cage.

Yet Schwartzman avoided going the child-actor route. "This woman who used to cut my hair as a kid [had surrounded] her mirror were headshots of little child actors with spiky hair dressed as cowboys and everything. And I just thought, "Man, that's not me', and that's why I got into music." Schwartzman has a one-man band called Coconut Records. "Music was about my inability to talk to girls, or about being angry, and movies didn't do that."

By chance, when Schwartzman was 17 he met a casting director at a party who offered him an audition for the high-school black comedy Rushmore. "Someone paid attention to me! I was so used to people talking to me to get to my more interesting friend instead. I'd always felt I was the wrong person. But then I read the script and there was an explosion in my brain. Everything I find funny was right here."

Schwartzman showed the script to his mother, who went straight out and rented videos of Harold and Maude, The Graduate, and Dog Day Afternoon. He watched all three twice and realised "that movies could make me feel the way music had". He then turned in a superbly nerdy performance as Rushmore's lead opposite Bill Murray.

But a man cannot live by nerdiness alone, and Schwartzman had to turn himself into a muscled action hero for Scott Pilgrim, as all the fights are done live on camera, with no CGI fakery. He trained for eight weeks. "It was really exciting, because trainers are so expensive and I could get into shape for free," he says.

They spent the morning training and the afternoon doing swordsmanship with Jackie Chan's stunt team. "I'm easily distracted so I had to stay focused so I didn't make the wrong move and take someone's legs off. We had plastic swords, but they were very hard. It takes a real connection between two people to sword-fight, it's like dancing, eye to eye, and your mind can't slip for a second. And we were also wearing circus harnesses so we could fly 30ft [9m] off the ground. I had some very odd bruises on my inner thighs."

Schwartzman has also taken to more traditional acting: he has just finished shooting the second series of the HBO show Bored to Death, in which he plays a failed novelist who becomes an unlicensed private detective on Craigslist.

"There are great scripts that get the balance right for me," he says. "It's really absurd, and then before you know it there's something meaningful or existential slipped in there. I like that. I feel very comfortable in that zone -- like in Scott Pilgrim -- of familiar but unknown landscapes, because life to me is that place. That's how I feel about the whole world."

Bored to Death's writer, novelist Jonathan Ames, is Schwartzman's best friend. "Like, I love him so deeply. He married me and my wife. He got ordained to marry us."

Schwartzman last year married his girlfriend, eco- fashion designer Brady Cunningham, and they are having a baby in December. Which explains the unusual moustache.

"Ah," says Schwartzman, stroking his bog-brush upper lip. "The moustache. Well, I've grown it for fun, and also because my dad had a moustache like this which was just constantly embarrassing to me. So I want to be around the house and be in photos that are embarrassing to my kid, too! I'm already thinking of ways to make my kid cringe. Then once it's been captured enough, I'll shave it off bit by bit."

To a Hitler moustache? "More Chaplin, depending on your relationship with darkness," he says, flashing the evil grin of a comic-book villain.