Riz Ahmed is on the rise as the new face of British cinema

"I never had a gap year," he explains, when we sit down. "I went straight from school to university. I went straight from university to drama school. And I left drama school early to take my first job, which was Road To Guantanamo. So that was my first real travelling experience." That was just six years ago, when an unknown Ahmed played one of the Tipton Three, the West Midlands men held for two years in the US government's detainee camp in Cuba, in Michael Winterbottom's awardwinning docu-drama.

The Wembley-raised Ahmed was not naive, having been educated at Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics, before he joined Central School of Speech and Drama to study acting. But even he couldn't have expected what followed. On the way back from the film's world premiere in Berlin, he was "unlawfully detained" at Luton airport – a frightening experience that saw him initially denied legal access as he was aggressively questioned, even asked if he became an actor "to publicise the struggles of Muslims".

Much like the authorities, the film industry has attempted to box in Ahmed, whose parents came to Britain after emigrating from Pakistan. "Post 9-11, I was maybe seen as the go-to young Muslim guy," he says, specifically referring to 2007's TV movie Britz, which saw him play one of two brothers torn in different directions after the Twin Towers terror attacks. Yet since then, Ahmed has managed to ease away from that stereotype – not least by satirising it as a Sheffield suicide bomber in Chris Morris's film Four Lions.

Since playing a cook in Roman thriller Centurion and a crack dealer in Shifty, the next three months see a trio of new movies that show just how far he's come. Glasgow Film Festival audiences are set to get a sneak peak of the first two: Black Gold is an all-star drama about warring Arab tribes during the 1930s oil boom, while Trishna is a modern-day version of Thomas Hardy's Tess Of The D'Urbervilles set in India. Following both, Ahmed is back on Shifty territory in Ill Manors, the directorial debut of Ben Drew (aka hip-hop/soul musician Plan B).

While both Black Gold and Ill Manors are very much ensemble pieces, Trishna sees him take the male lead opposite Slumdog Millionaire star Freida Pinto. Relocating Hardy's tragic tale of a "pure woman faithfully presented" to Rajasthan, Pinto plays the title role, a young woman from a poor rural family who is forced to seek work when her father has an accident. Ahmed plays Jay, an English son of a wealthy tycoon, who hires Trishna to work in his father's hotel before falling into a forbidden affair with her.

Reunited with Winterbottom, Ahmed admits "it couldn't have been more different" for their second outing. "Road To Guantanamo was being chained up, beaten up, shackled and interrogated by really burly extras for months," he recalls, "and this was basically staying in a paradise hotel in Rajasthan. You open your front door and there are monkeys and peacocks on your doorstep."

With Ahmed's character an amalgam of the book's two male protagonists, Angel Clare and Alec D'Urberville, Winterbottom's take on the novel is quite sensual, with Ahmed and Pinto embroiled in a series of increasingly explicit sex scenes.

"I think those bedroom scenes they have together are a really crucial part of the story," the actor argues. "I don't feel any of it is gratuitous. What you've got there is a very efficient and interesting way of telling the story of how a relationship develops, or in this case self-destructs."

An eloquent speaker, Ahmed makes a strong case also for the reasons behind transplanting the story to India. "I think a lot of the elements in Tess Of The D'Urbervilles that are the source of tragedy are very much alive today in India. For example, it really haunts Tess that she's had sex before marriage, because it's a socially conservative society, and in rural India that's very much true today.

"Similarly, you have the massive class gulf that there is between Alec and Tess, the land-owning class and the people that work on that land. And that again is very much alive in India."

We move on to Black Gold, and Ahmed's eyes light up with excitement. "I haven't seen it yet," he says, explaining that he missed the premiere because he's been filming Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a forthcoming adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's novel co-starring Kate Hudson and Kiefer Sutherland that looks set to be the film that introduces Ahmed to Hollywood. "What's Black Gold like?" he asks. "It's an epic, right?"

Indeed it is – a $55 million Arab-funded epic, to be precise, making it the most expensive film ever to come from the region. The director is French veteran Jean-Jacques Annaud, the man behind such big-scale dramas as Seven Years In Tibet and The Name Of The Rose, which may account for why the film's spectacle is more satisfying that its story. It follows two rival sultans, the Muslim traditionalist Amar (Mark Strong) and the more profiteering Nesib (Antonio Banderas), who sparks up a war when he begins to drill for oil.

While reviews have been mixed – Lawrence Of Arabia, this is not – most have praised Ahmed, who plays Amar's son, Dr Ali, and "thankfully injects a note of comic irony", as trade paper Variety put it, in an amusing portrait of desert-bound eccentricity. The way Ahmed talks, he sounded overwhelmed, being on such a big production. "It required a different kind of stamina, a different kind of focus, because you're doing so much action. And the scale of things was so big. It was like finding your little space and slotting into it."

Arguably the role that will get him the most attention is in Ill Manors, if only because the film is tailor-made for the teen audience that flocked to films like the Noel Clarke-scripted Kidulthood. Ahmed calls it "a very gritty, social-realist youth movie" – though with scenes of prostitution, hard drug use and brutal violence it's bound to cause a stir among the moral majority. That said, Ahmed's character Aaron, a small-time dealer, is the film's moral compass – a character who tries to do the right thing even in the bleakest situation.

Ill Manors was written, directed and scored by Ben Drew, who previously featured in a video for the Riz MC track Sour Times, so I ask Ahmed what the musician was like to work with. "He's like a dog with a bone," he grins. "He'll get what he wants. He's very specific about what he wants, but at the same time, he's very open about saying: 'I don't have a clue what I'm doing with this. Riz, what do you think?' And that was really cool. That's a really lovely mix – he knows what he wants but is still definitely open."

If Riz MC isn't quite as prominent a musician as Plan B – his debut album MICroscope came out in 2011, the year he also signed to Brighton-based independent label Tru Thoughts – he's certainly not afraid to be controversial. In 2006, the same year as The Road To Guantanamo, he saw his track Post 9/11 Blues banned from the airwaves for its "politically sensitive" lyrics ("Post 9/11 getting around can be expensive/Cost ya 12 dead Iraqis for a litre of unleaded").

Ahmed denies he's out to cause trouble. "I don't see myself as a political rapper," he says, believing his lyrics owe more to the observational comedy of stand-ups such as Bill Hicks. Then again, his definition of trouble is rather loose. When he was 11, he was on a school trip at the Science Museum. The task was to use a recording booth, which he did – rapping the Wu-Tang Clan lyrics: "I'm going to give it to ya/ I like cocaine straight from Bolivia." It seems he's been upsetting the status quo ever since.

Black Gold and Trishna screen at the Glasgow Film Festival on February 17 and 18, and are released nationwide on February 24 and March 9 respectively. Ill Manors opens on May 4.