JACOB James Beswick did his first professional job at 16, a year younger than the violent gang leader he plays in Pilot Theatre and York Theatre Royal's new stage adaptation of Graham Greene's 1930s' murder thriller Brighton Rock.

"It was a music video for a dance track by Sound Of Eden called Another Chance, set in a school classroom," recalls Londoner Jacob, who was also doing "loads of school productions, bordering on professional" at the time.

"We took a premiere of Ali Smith's Hotel World to the Edinburgh Fringe when I was 17, and I've done a few Fringe shows since then too – and I was in National Youth Theatre shows from 15 to 22 when I got an agent and started working professionally properly."

You may remember Beswick as an acrobatic, London-accented Mowgli in the West Yorkshire Playhouse's winter production of The Jungle Book in Leeds in 2013-2014 and he has played another Yorkshire stage too, starring as Billy Casper in Philip Osment and Kully Thiarai’s adaptation of Barry Hines's Kes at CAST in Doncaster in September 2014.

"That was when I first met Esther Richardson, who's now Pilot Theatre's artistic director. I did the R & D (research and development) on that show when Esther was involved, though she ended up not directing the production, and I also did some scratch readings for short films with Esther for iShorts at the Soho Theatre," says James, who is now 27 but can pass for much younger.

He must have made a considerable impression on Esther, who cast him for the lead in Brighton Rock, her first production as Pilot's artistic director since taking over from company founder Marcus Romer.

"I was in New York, doing Duncan Macmillan's play People, Places And Things, a National Theatre and Headlong production that started at the National Theatre, then moved to Wyndham's Theatre and off-Broadway, when Brighton Rock came up. Esther said they'd done R&D on it and she'd thought about me for that but I was already rehearsing in New York, so I ended up doing a self-tape and sent that over to Esther," says Jacob.

"I did the scene where they're at a table at the start and the scene where there's a massive power shift between Pinkie and Rose [the 16-year-old waitress he later marries], when she shows him a newspaper, and I got cast off that."

Beswick had not seen either Brighton Rock film from 1948 or 2011 before being cast. "And I still haven't because I didn't want to be influenced by them," he says. "Apparently they're both very naturalistic, but our production is very theatrical by comparison.

York Press:

Jacob James Beswick as Mowgli in The Jungle Book at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, in 2013

"I read the book a few times before we started rehearsals, but after a while you have to forget about any research you've done, especially for this, because you have to tell the story as Bryony Lavery's adaptation tells it, and Rose, for example, has more autonomy in our story.

"There's more room for Pinkie to be at the mercy of his experiences and more room for him to be more vulnerable in the play than there is in Greene's book, and it's good to start to see the play as separate from the book."

In Beswick's view Brighton Rock is a "really messed-up version of Romeo And Juliet. "That makes it an interesting story with a very sadomasochistic relationship involving Pinkie and Rose that you don't often see but you can tell that young people relate to it with its story of a very toxic, quite vulnerable young man and a girl who is seemingly innocent at the beginning," says Jacob He believed that he should feel "reasonably empathetic" towards Pinkie.

"There's talk of him being a psychopath but I wanted to make him empathetic. That's why I did a lot of research on him, when he's operating in a world where murder is punishable by death, so when Kite, who's been his father figure, is murdered, carrying out a murder in response is his way of administering the law, so it's a revenge story and anyone can relate to that," he says.

"I can imagine why someone would act like that if you're brought up in a violent, masculine environment, and I can understand that eye-for-an-eye mentality in his actions."

Although unspoken, Pinkie appears to be a repressed homosexual. "He watched his parents having sex, in every detail, when he was young and that adds to his revulsion and inability to confront his sexuality," says Jacob. "His behaviour is partly him expelling his sexual discomfort and frustration on something he can control.

"I'm gay, and taking myself back to that time and thinking about a lot of men who felt the need to conform to that masculinity, it's not easy to tap into that, but I already have that in my own lived experience. Pinkie can't even consider it as an option, not in that environment of hyper-masculinity, and he shows a fear of intimacy in general, which is not exclusively but definitely is a male problem."

Pilot Theatre and York Theatre Royal's Brighton Rock ended  its York Theatre Royal on March 3. The national tour includes Hull Truck Theatre, March 20 to 24, 7.30pm and 2pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01482 323638 or at hulltruck.co.uk.