“I’M A bit surprised by all this really,” says Michael Shannon, gazing out of the window of a plush Berlin hotel. “When I was a little boy, this was not what I imagined my life would be!”

Raised in Lexington, Kentucky, this Hollywood star’s upbringing was troubled. His parents, both married five times, divorced when he was a child. Lonely, he found high school a very miserable experience – so much so, he would tell his teachers that his mother had passed away. When his father sent him for help, he pulled all of the books off the therapist’s shelf.

Perhaps it is no surprise that the 41-year-old Shannon, dressed today in a frayed T-shirt and jeans, is rather bamboozled by all his success. An Oscar-nomination for Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road; a juicy role in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire; and the chance to play Superman’s nemesis General Zod in 2013’s Man of Steel … these weren’t exactly the dreams Shannon had as a kid. “There was a while when I thought I wanted to be an architect,” he ventures. “I thought that would be good. Though I hear it’s brutal – a hard field to make any money.”

Even now, over two decades into a movie career that began with a bit part in Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day, Shannon still can’t get over the fact that he gets stopped on the street. “It’s trippy,” he says, noting he was recently accosted by a fan whilst visiting Berlin’s SS museum, the Topography of Terror. “I’m in this place, all these thousands of miles away from my home … how is this even possible that anyone here would know who I was? That’s the power of cinema, right?”

It’s only going to get more intense for Shannon, who has a huge slate of films due out in the next year. Currently to be seen (mainly as a corpse) in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, a follow-on from Man of Steel, he’s next up in Midnight Special, the new film from the prodigiously talented Jeff Nichols, for whom Shannon is something of a lucky charm. They first worked together on Nichols’ debut Shotgun Stories, and Shannon has appeared in every film since.

“I think we have similar concerns, as people, as artists – similar perspectives, similar obsessions maybe. There’s a real strong current through-line in his work of parents and children, and the drama that’s inherent in that,” says Shannon, who has two daughters, Sylvia and Marion with his actress-partner Kate Arrington. “Me and Jeff both became fathers around the same time, and I think that’s really affected us as people and as artists.”

It’s certainly a theme prominent in Midnight Special, a sci-fi film that feels like a throwback to the likes of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and John Carpenter’s Starman. Shannon plays Roy, a blue collar father to a young boy (Jaeden Lieberher) who appears to have mysterious extraterrestrial powers. Pursued by the FBI, Roy goes on the run with his son in a desperate attempt to save him from being probed by the authorities.

Calling Nichols’ work secretly very lyrical and poetic, Shannon is coy when it comes to the film’s multiple meanings. “Well, there are no answers,” he shrugs. “It’s not like we secretly have the answers to the many questions that the film raises. I didn’t need Jeff to explain it to me. I don’t honestly think Roy knows what the hell’s going on. All Roy knows is that he loves his son. That’s basically all he knows. That’s his whole motivation for everything he does in the movie.”

He talks of Nichols’ characters as “salt-of-the-earth, hardscrabble” types, and it’s easy to imagine Shannon’s the same (in fact, his mother was a lawyer, his father an accounting professor, and he’s based in Brooklyn). But there’s something awkward about Shannon, who doesn’t really make eye contact during our interview. Acting must be torturous for him, I think. “It never ceases to amaze me, the situations you find yourself in where you just have to establish intimacy with complete strangers,” he nods.

Shannon has already shot a cameo in Nichols’ next film, Loving, a true story about an interracial marriage, which features his Midnight Special co-star Joel Edgerton. But while that is expected to premiere in Cannes, Shannon is next up in Elvis & Nixon, the intriguing-sounding true story of when the king of rock’n’roll met the titular president at the White House. Shannon plays Presley to Kevin Spacey’s Tricky Dicky.

Taking place in 1970, when Elvis decided he wanted a badge from the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, much of the film is focused on getting the singer to the Oval Office, says Shannon.

“It’s not like Elvis just showed up and they opened the front door. The first time he asked, they actually said ‘No!’ Nixon didn’t want to meet with Elvis Presley. The president can’t just meet with rock stars whenever they decide to show up, so it was a fairly elaborate process to get the two of them together.”

If that wasn’t enough, Shannon has films with Werner Herzog (Salt and Fire), fashion designer Tom Ford (Nocturnal Animals) and Joshua Marston (Complete Unknown) in the can. His career seems like a miracle of scheduling, I suggest, and he chuckles. Does he have a good team around him? “Yeah,” he drawls, slowly, staring into the middle distance again, “but at the end of the day, I’m the one who has to get out of bed when the alarm goes off, put the make-up on and say the lines!”

Midnight Special opens on April 8; Elvis & Nixon is released on June 24.