The Man Who Sold The World Angel-faced actor Michael Pitt used to be mistaken for Brad's little brother. They're not related, but the pretender to the indie throne is now carving out his own niche playing lost souls and psychos in the likes of The Dreamers and Funny Games U.S. "I'm a bullshit artist," he tells Ben Cobb.

Michael Pitt can be a pain in the arse. The 26-year-old is in a Covent Garden hotel to talk about Funny Games U.S., Michael Haneke's American remake of his 1997 critical hit. The interview starts 40 minutes late because Pitt overslept. The staff are in meltdown: Pitt, in black from head to toe, has a lit Marlboro hanging from his mouth and the room is thick with fag smoke. Next day, at the photo-shoot, Pitt will have to be coaxed into taking off his sunglasses ("My eyes look like I've been smoking crack all night," he counters) and putting on the clothes ("I don't wear other people's stuff").

Mercifully, this adolescent posturing is not the whole story. As the PR leaves us to it, coughing pointedly as she closes the door, Pitt smiles: "I think she's trying to tell me something." He seems almost sheepish. And it is suddenly obvious that if anyone had actually asked him to put out his cigarette, he would have done so. Immediately.

The truth is that Pitt doesn't really enjoy doing press. Though unfailingly polite and very sweet throughout our conversation, he remains guarded: long pauses greet every question, and his responses all end with an intense blue-eyed stare. "I started out in my career by being very open about my personal past," he explains, fiddling with the over-sized black cross around his neck, "and they just ran away with it. It's not a good feeling to see things written down the wrong way."

All he will say now on the subject is that he had a "rocky" upbringing. The youngest of four from a working class family in the small town of West Orange, New Jersey, Pitt was "a black sheep, a loner". "My parents really didn't know what to do with me... I didn't really know what to do with me."

The stand-off lasted until he was 16. Penniless, Pitt then crossed the Hudson River into New York City to try to break into acting. He slept rough and then worked as a bicycle courier while living with nine others in a one-bedroom apartment; but slowly the acting work began to trickle in. "Being able to buy my own groceries and pay my rent was a huge, huge thing for me... Acting was a kind of salvation," he says. A year-long cycle of TV-bit parts and movie walk-ons was broken when Pitt won the role of a troubled loser in Depression-era saga The Trestle At Pope Lick Creek. In the Off-Broadway audience was a casting director from Dawson's Creek.

Pitt played Michelle Williams' quarterback squeeze for the show's third season. An army of teenaged fans worked themselves into an on-line frenzy over his "pillow lips". "It was a very confusing time for me," he admits. "I was really passionate and naieve and I only wanted to work on things that I thought made a difference. Dawson's Creek was everything against what I was about. But I wasn't in a position to say no and it opened the doors."

The first such door was transsexual musical Hedwig And The Angry Inch, a surprise hit at the 2001 Sundance Festival. Pitt is mesmerising as Tommy Gnosis, the grungy kid who steals Hedwig's songs and breaks her heart. It was the beginning of better things: "I was so happy on that set," Pitt confesses. "I thought, 'Finally, no one is going to judge me and no one is going to think I'm a freak. I can just work'."

Hedwig may have put him on the movie map, but it was Jake Gyllenhaal who inadvertently gave Pitt his big break. The older actor had signed to star with Bond girl Eva Green in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, but changed his mind at the last minute, reportedly because of the film's many sex scenes. Pitt, who had been passed over for the part, got a call just two days before filming was due to begin. "I was like, 'Fuck you! You didn't even want me!'" he laughs. "And yes, I was nervous about doing the sex scenes, because it's seriously looked down upon in American culture and it was a big career risk to take. But personally I don't agree with the kind of values that make it totally fine to show someone getting their head blown off, but not to show the human body..."

Pitt sealed his indie prince credentials with his next major role, as a Kurt Cobain clone staggering towards oblivion in Gus Van Sant's improvised opus Last Days (see the interview with Van Sant in this issue). At last, Van Sant had found a talent approaching that of his former muse, River Phoenix: on camera, both men are open-faced and heart-stoppingly vulnerable. Pitt relished the challenge: "Making up a film like Last Days on the spot is definitely difficult. Just walking out into the woods with a camera and saying, 'Let's make the beginning of the movie' is scary." 

"A film like Funny Games is still extremely difficult to do but I knew as long as I knew my lines and kept listening to Michael Haneke it would be decent."

Funny Games U.S. is unlikely to be block-buster material thanks to its subject matter: a 12-hour torture session. But Pitt's chilling turn as Paul, one of two clean-cut psychopaths who hold Tim Roth, Naomi Watts and their small son hostage, is certain to raise his profile. He does evil almost too well.

The violence, played out off camera, is made all the more uncomfortable by the absence of any offered motive. "It's more interesting if there isn't a reason," nods Pitt. "And it's also more true. With something like Columbine they had all these theories why those kids shot everybody up, like video games or Marilyn Manson. But it's a lot scarier if they did it just because they could."

Next up is another change of direction, which sees Pitt snuggling up to Keira Knightley in Francois (Red Violin) Girard's sweeping 19th century epic Silk. The movie was shot on location in Italy and Japan. For Pitt, who had barely left American shores before his film career took off, the travel element of his job has meant much more than just clocking up air miles. "Working in different countries has changed me a lot," he says. "Where I grew up, most people never leave: my parents had never left the country until I flew them out. It's like a bubble. So when I went to Paris to do The Dreamers I ended up learning more about America: you have this new perspective. It's amazing but maddening, because your family and friends don't understand because they haven't left."

Pitt's recent CV may have secured him a place at the top of the hot list, but he is still desperate to avoid the LA scramble. "I am used to New York and all different professions and people who don't give a shit," he explains. "I have a small house in Brooklyn. I know the guys in the corner store on my block. I don't know if they're aware I'm an actor - they probably wouldn't think I'd live in the neighbourhood if I was. So I live this pretty normal life... Well, not normal, but it's definitely healthy for me. Fame can be a dangerous thing to a certain type of person."

Funny Games U.S. is scheduled for release in the UK in January 2008