Even if it took another two years for others to realise it, 2022 was a pivotal moment for Nabhaan Rizwan. When I’m expecting to speak to the 27-year-old British-Pakistani actor in August for his wry, eerie arthouse comedy In Camera, the phone call is rescheduled at the last minute (well, 20 minutes before) as he’s busy with the launch of a new Netflix series, Kaos, in which he outdoes Jeff Goldblum in exuding pure, unbridled charisma. Both projects – one’s a slow-burn indie that embraces awkward pauses, the other is rapidly paced to prevent Netflix streamers from switching off – were shot two years ago.

“I did In Camera, and then, two weeks after wrapping that, I did Kaos,” says Rizwan, a day later, from his home in London. “These projects were a real watershed moment in terms of how involved I like to be artistically. I was making, quote unquote, ‘wrong choices’ in the way I was handling stuff. I wanted to take risks, and it’s paying off now they’re coming out together.”

What does he mean by crossroads and “wrong choices”? “There’s a style of acting that’s very tried and trusted, and very safe in this country,” he explains in a hushed, thoughtful tone. “We’re one of the best at it, in terms of dramatic naturalism. The UK is a very abundant export of that type of acting and talent. I wanted to move on from that. I wanted to let go of the idea of being ‘good’, and to just take risks. That showed me the need to take projects based on enjoyment, and the rest will follow.”

Unlike the typical fare churned out by the British film industry, In Camera is esoteric, loose, and genuinely puzzling. Written and directed by Naqqash Khalid, the satire of what it’s like to be an Asian actor in the UK isn’t really plot-driven, nor does it stick to a single tone. Musical in structure, the film could be remixed with scenes played in a different order to generate alternate interpretations. Ostensibly, it stars Rizwan as Aden, a frustrated actor in London whose most recent role is as a corpse on a British crime-drama. The demeaning gig, at least, pays, unlike Aden’s failed auditions for the cliched characters made available for British actors with his skin colour. On the side, he’s paid per hour to pretend to be a dead relative for a grieving, white, middle-class family with money to spare.

According to Khalid, In Camera was designed to be a horror movie about the white gaze. Rizwan, though, has his own description. “Naqqash introduced it to me as a colonial fairytale,” says Rizwan. “He wanted to use the medium of acting as a conduit of – not so much a message, but a feeling. We wanted to put forward the feeling of discomfort that exists in our world today. We don’t want to tell you what it is… It’s the premise of being perceived in the world. There’s inherent discomfort that comes from that and goes quite unacknowledged.”

As Khalid was an outsider to the film industry when writing In Camera, he took input from Rizwan, an experienced actor whose credits include rapping alongside Riz Ahmed in Mogul Mowgli, battling for survival in Station Eleven, and memorably overdosing in the first episode of Industry. For Aden, acting means attending casting calls where he’s surrounded by identically dressed, zombified, British-Asian hopefuls who curse the “one guy” that gets all the roles. “Naqqash and I are interested in the surreal,” says Rizwan. “We wanted to portray what audition rooms feel like, not what they are like. This is how it feels, emotionally, to have other people fit you in their frame. It’s what they think you are, and what they think you should be.”

People are aware of what’s going on in the world. We know the score. We just want people to taste and smell how it is to live in the situation we find ourselves in – Nabhaan Rizwan

Unlike Aden, Rizwan has avoided typecasting with a varied career that, even before In Camera and Kaos, demonstrated his ability to juggle deadly serious dramas with slapstick sitcoms. His most high-profile project may have been as a soldier in Sam Mendes’ war film 1917, which led to Laurence Fox publicly complaining about the role as “forcing diversity on people”. Rizwan would rather not discuss this incident.

What, though, is the secret to standing out in auditions? “Daniel Kaluuya said to me, ‘There’s always someone sitting in a room deciding who gets what, and who wins what, and it’s all bullshit. When you finally get your flowers, just know you’ve not done anything special. You’re who you’ve been all along.’ That’s how I approach things. It saves a lot of the self-scrutiny that can come with the job.”

Born in Essex, Rizwan comes from a family of performers. His mother, Shahnaz Rizwan, acted in Indian TV shows before moving to the UK, while his older brother is the former Taskmaster contestant Mawaan Rizwan, an extroverted comedian who jokes about how one sibling does gags about buttholes, the other does Shakespeare on stage. When Nabhaan was 11, he would appear in Mawaan’s homemade, viral YouTube videos (the song “Chips & Beans” is an early example); on Mawaan’s BBC sitcom Juice, the two brothers and their mother star as fictionalised versions of themselves.

“I’m writing on season two of Juice,” says Rizwan. “I love working with Mawaan. It’s interesting to see how our brains meld together to make this mad comedy show. We want to stretch it in all kinds of unimaginable ways.” He hints at other scripts he’s writing and a desire to operate as, in his words, an incubator for new talent. “What feels pertinent to me now, while I feel young, is to find really brilliant artists. It’s important to push the envelope with each generation.”

For now, there’s Kaos, which I inform Rizwan received a five-star rave from the Guardian the day of our phone call – he interrupts me, insisting that he avoids all reviews of his work, both positive and negative – and whatever audiences make of In Camera, an unsettling feature that follows a passive character who internalises his emotions except for films within the film. Rizwan reveals that a heavily researched backstory was created then removed. “We wanted Aden to be inherently unknowable,” he says. “The other elements in the frame around him become super-important.”

In addition to exploring the film industry’s racist typecasting, In Camera also stars Rory Fleck Byrne, an Irish actor, as a sleep-deprived doctor who suffers from hallucinations, and Amir El-Masry, an Egyptian actor, as a swaggering menswear designer who insists that now is the time for Aden to exploit his skin colour. The film is, then, what Rizwan earlier deemed to be a “colonial fairytale”, except the actor doesn’t want to explain his thoughts on racism any further. “People are aware of what’s going on in the world,” he says. “We know the score. We just want people to taste and smell how it is to live in the situation we find ourselves in.”

In Camera is out in UK and Irish cinemas on September 13