We caught up with Michael in his Pinewood changing room – with Lawrence of Arabia, a reference point for the actor's performance, playing in the background – and asked him about humanity, working with Ridley Scott and Prometheus' weighty themes...

Q: You're playing David...

A: Dav-eed. I'm just kidding! That's what he likes to call himself! [laughs]

Q: Who is Dav-eed?

A: He's the robot. Or humanoid. Or android. Or whatever you want to call it. He's like a butler. The first thing I wanted to do with him was to make him ambiguous. Should he be having emotions? I wanted to keep it ambiguous and have a lot of fun with it and enjoy it. I don't know if that's an easy description, but there's so much comedy in him, actually, that I wanted to try to explore that as much as I could.

Q: Comedy? Even in an intense film like this?

A: Think Buster Keaton. Yesterday I kept banging my head off the screen on the ship and tripped over something else, and it was like a Buster Keaton moment! I also like the idea of treating him as a child, in certain respects. He's been on this ship for two and a half years before everybody comes out of cryo-stasis.

Q: What does he do in that time?

A: He studies things, he watches films. There's various things he soaks up. He's been studying what Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) have come up with through their findings and research and the language that he thinks they [the Engineers] would speak, he's been practicing that.

Q: So, is Laurence of Arabia his model?

A: Yes. That was Ridley's initial idea for the hair and for the look. We also took inspiration from David Bowie and some of this looks as well. I liked the idea of having a feminine quality to him for sure. Both Lawrence and David Bowie have elements of that. He's curious about everything. Something blowing up or something killing him, if that happened, there would be curiosity right up until the moment that it happened. He thinks I'll do this because that will have a knock-on effect and I might learn something else from it, rather than it having anything to do with morality.

Q: Is David dangerous?

A: I think he knows his limits. He'll know his limits when he gets there. Limit doesn't exist for him. He will go until the point when he can't go any further, physically. He doesn't think about people's suffering that much. He has an empathy and he's developed that. But he's more curious, like a child burning ants with a magnifying glass. There's a cruelty there for sure, but it's almost before a child comprehends cruelty. He does things for an end result.

Q: Is David closer to Ash or Bishop in terms of predecessors in the Alien universe?

A: I don't really know. I haven't really thought about them. I haven't seen either of the films in a while and I didn't rewatch them after I found out about this. I'm finding my influences in other areas and I don't want to be influenced by those performances. But I don't think he has any real moral compass. There's something about him. He's quire chuffed with himself. He's very full if himself and je thinks he has most of the answers. In human company, he feel far superior. But I think there's also a longing to be own master, if you like. There's a very interesting moment when he has a discussion with Shaw, a philosophical conversation about your creator and how he feels about his creator, and that's a tell-tale sign about him, that he does want to be free of his master. That must mean that there are elements of humanity in him.

Q: It is a film about creators and their relationship with their creations.

It's about how the human beings are desperate in various ways to face this knowledge and get the answers to their questions, and not getting the answers to their questions.
I think he finds that amusing. They're [humans] not very nice to him. He's a robot and there's a prejudice there. He's never really been accepted and I think he does want to be accepted, very much so. But they always have that differential – we made you because we could. What's interesting about him is that I do think this thing has been designed to behave like a human, but on a superior level, but it's interesting the human personality traits start to bleed into the robot.

Q: Can you talk about the big ideas that are being tackled here?

A: What is the purpose of us being here? That's the underlying question of the human race. That is why people are searching for heaven and for God, or Gods, as it was before. Why? There must be some purpose for us to be here, right? And that's being explored in the film.

Q: Were you aware of the Prometheus myth?

A: I was. I do enjoy the greek classics and ancient history. The liver getting pecked away every night is a nasty affair, really.

Q: How does that tie in to the film?

A: Perhaps the fact that we keep going round in a circle, maybe that's it. It's a cyclical thing. There's no resolution to the end of it, perhaps. It's an ongoing quest.

Q: How did you get involved?

A: Ridley and I had me before in Los Angeles a couple of years ago. I had a great chat him then. It came up around October of last year. I went in to meet him and then I got the script. For a couple of hours, with the red dot on my forehead! I thought, wow, it's like Alien, but I know that this isn't Alien. It's a different thing.

Q: How different?

A: There's a connection to Alien. It's a totally different world in this film that we're introduced to, that runs parallel with it. One word I would use to describe it is intelligent. It's a very intelligent script. Everything's there for a reason. There are many layers to it and it's very specific and it goes back to that idea of a thriller being within this sci-fi film. It's not a thriller. It's a suspense film. I wouldn't say Hitchcockian, but it has that build-up. It's sinister. There's something sinister brewing. You'd have to be pretty stupid not to back the quality of the script and the quality of Ridley. The thing is, you want to be doing something different, otherwise what's the point? You can put something put that does well commercially, but how long does it last? Does it sit in 20 years' time? Films like 2001 and Alien are films that stand the test of time because they were different and because they had an intelligence to them.

Q: If you had a chance to meet God, what would you say?

A: I'd say fancy a cup of tea?