With his distinct clipped vowels and wry, disarmingly straightforward demeanour, he’s not what you expect from a man tipped as award season’s front runner for his guest appearance in The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, the face of Chanel’s new men’s fragrance and seller of tabloids simply by dint of being alive. Today, he sips his green tea as we chat, pausing to consider each question before launching into an eloquent, discerning and refreshingly frank response.

‘I know it’s possible to be in the public eye without the constant scrutiny. This is going to sound like a major name-drop, but I’m mates with Stormzy and it’s incredible to me how he gets left alone. He gets to make his music, have his life, and then pop up out of nowhere to release an album and perform Glastonbury, and then it all gets pretty chill for him. When I got photographed on that paddleboard a few summers ago, he thought it was awful, but we laugh about it now. He’s put me in his phone as Anaconda, apparently.’

Ah yes. I’m glad Carlisle is the one to raise this (so to speak). The paddleboard photographs he refers to broke the internet in summer 2020, when unbeknownst to him he was snapped cavorting on a lakeside beach with a mystery blonde – stark naked. Twitter had a meltdown over the size of his manhood, with everyone from The Late, Late Show with James Corden to Boris Johnson passing comment. He seemingly took it in good humour at the time, but months later went viral once more with a blogpost he wrote about the invasion of his privacy.

‘I just had to say something,’ he explains, in a sudden bout of seriousness. ‘Like fair play, I had my knob out in public. We were in France, and I was in love and feeling happy and free. And then the media, and social media, made one of the happiest, most romantic days of my life into a sort of joke, and it took me ages to work up the courage to say it made me uncomfortable. I just kept thinking, if it happened to a woman, would people have been sharing it like that? Or would it have been unfeminist?’ And that’s exactly what his post explored. ‘Like, okay, we know what the male gaze is and how it makes women feel, but surely the definition of equality is not that we then adapt a sort of female gaze that reduces men to the size of their … whatever. Equality is saying hey, let’s not make anyone feel this way. Let the man paddleboard in peace! And maybe buy him some new swimwear!’

He breaks out into a charming chuckle at that, doing what he’s become so well known for in his movies: pushing his audience to an emotional edge, and pulling the rug from under them with his humour and delight.