“I WANTED to figure out what was wrong with me in my twenties …”

We are one and a half minutes in to our conversation and Simon Amstell has already got to the heart of the matter. He is talking about his new film Benjamin, but, really, he is talking about himself.

“So, I started writing various arguments that I’d had with boyfriends in that time … And it turned out I was a lunatic.”

Monday evening in Glasgow’s Citizen M hotel. Amstell is finishing off his dinner; falafel, humus, some “leaves”. Later, he will go off to introduce a screening of his film at the Glasgow Film Festival. But now we’re talking about the lunatic he was and why he’s made a film about him. Kind of.

These days Amstell is 39 but remains sickeningly fresh-faced and instantly recognisable from the days when he terrorised pop stars as host of Never Mind the Buzzcocks (insert contractual mention of Preston of the Ordinary Boys walking out at this point) or sometimes just baffled them on Popworld (he once offered Gwen Stefani a piece of cheese on the red carpet).

But while all that was going on, Amstell was also working his way through a series of relationships that ended up crashing and burning. Benjamin is the movie he wrote to try to work out why that might have been.

It is a film about a fictional film director not a million miles away from Amstell, though in this case played by Colin (Merlin) Morgan using his own Northern Irish accent. Benjamin is trying to finish his own film while failing to commit to love in his private life.

“It’s all based on not the events so much, but the feelings,” Amstell says, addressing how autobiographical Benjamin might be.” Everything that character feels I felt at certain points and so I trust it. It’s not some broad fantasy of what the character might be feeling. It’s true. It did hurt. It did feel very awkward.”

Watching it, Simon, I say, is excruciating because all of Benjamin’s self-consciousness and insecurities are so front and centre. I started to itch, I tell him.

“Imagine being me,” he says laughing.

“The film became about somebody terrified of intimacy and seeking love from an audience because that was all he knew how to do,” Amstell says.

He doesn’t need to say that was him because, well, it’s obvious. And the truth is, Amstell is, maybe always has been, something of an open book. When he wrote his sitcom Grandma’s House it was also a fictionalisation of his own story. His comedy comes from life.

Does that twentysomething he used to be still feel close by? Or is there a distance now between you and him?

“Yeah,” he says to the latter. “It was a real gift writing about a film-maker who has a film premiere at the London Film Festival and feels really anxious about the whole thing and doesn’t enjoy any of it and is then reviewed badly because I was able to think, ‘Oh, that guy was a mess. I don’t want to be that guy.’ I’ve written him out of me.”

So, if you don’t like Benjamin it’s not a rejection of Amstell. That said, it helps, he admits, that the early reviews have been good. “But I think even if they hadn’t been the case it wouldn’t have been as life or death for me as it was for Benjamin.”

In short, he’s got over the fear of bad reviews. But it’s been there in the past. “That moment in the film where Mark Kermode gives Benjamin the review that destroys his life, I had something similar happen to me between seven and 10 years ago. It was this crushing moment.

“The problem wasn’t the review. The problem was I was living alone with nothing but a cat and classic depression.”

Ah. And that is no longer the case? “I have a boyfriend now,” he says.

In short, as he approaches his forties, Simon Amstell feels in control of who he is. Or, at least, more in control. He’s not as driven by the need to be successful or famous anymore. Work is no longer a means to an end.

“If I feel the urge to go on stage and do some stand-up that just happens. And if an idea comes for a film, that will, with some struggle, get written out of me. I’ve mostly let go of the 13-year-old who just needed to get somewhere.”

Well, yes. To be honest, though, I don’t think at 13 I wanted to get anywhere. I was too busy browsing the nearest comic book rack. At that age Amstell already had rather loftier ambitions. He wasn’t just watching TV. He wanted to be on it.

“I just saw a lot of joy in the television. I really liked watching The Big Breakfast and seeing Ruby Wax interview people in this anarchic, naughty way and I don’t know. I think it just felt safe. This is how I think about it now. ‘There’s safety in the television. There’s diversity in there. I’ll be accepted. People who are not the same as everybody else are celebrated rather than repressed over there. I think I should be over there.’

That desire for belonging seems strange to me, I say, because when you then got on TV the younger you didn’t seem too bothered as to whether you were liked or not.

“Of course, he was,” Amstell says, bursting into laughter.

He thinks about the question for a moment. “Maybe it wasn’t about being liked, but I was definitely seeking attention. All the people I liked growing up were funny in a way that was quite naughty. They weren’t playing by the normal rules. That seemed to be the way to go about things. But …” He starts laughing again. “… I was definitely interested in being liked.”

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Fame was a goal too. But not any old fame, he adds. There was a boy at his school in the year above him who went off to be in a boyband and Amstell thought that was a mistake. The schoolboy would either not be successful or he would be, but as a member of a boyband. Neither fate was appealing.

“I think I was quite definite about the kind of fame I wanted,” he says.

And when it came, he liked it. Or at least until he realised, he knew how to make people laugh. “And then it felt a bit boring to me and made me think if I feel bored then other people will start to feel bored watching it, so I got out of there.”

How do you look back on that person you were then? “I think I’m happy that I’m different now …” he begins.

“But do we ever really change though, Simon?” I say interrupting

“Let me deal with this question first. I think he was great. I think he was really brilliant. He was so young doing all that stuff and if he hadn’t done all that stuff then I wouldn’t have been able to make the film I’ve just made or be able to tour around and do stand-up.

“What was your other question? Do we change? I think so. I had about two years of therapy where the diagnosis was classic depression and I don’t think I have classic depression anymore, so, I think, yeah, change is possible.”

In short, when it comes down to it, he is not Benjamin. Not anymore. “That character is anxious and depressed and I’m not really those things anymore. Those feelings pop up occasionally, but I’m very aware of them and I think I know what to do to deal with them.”

As for the future? More stand-up, more movies, he hopes. “The ambition now really is to keep being vulnerable enough to tell the truth in public.”

You could lie and still be funny, couldn’t you? “It’s never really worked for me. When I try out new material and I’m improvising on stage something will come out of me because I feel I need to fill the gap where a joke needs to be and if it isn’t quite true the audience doesn’t really laugh in the way that they do with the other stuff, and I don’t really trust it.

“Also, part of the joy of writing a screenplay is, I get to figure out what was going on for me or who I am. If I don’t tell the truth I don’t get that therapy. I just end up with a script that isn’t very good and with a life that isn’t as authentic as it could have been.”

So basically, you’re telling me that you’re not hoping to get to direct the next James Bond film.

“I doubt they’d ask, he says. “Unless it’s James Bond in therapy for two hours …”

Simon Amstell’s film Benjamin is in cinemas and on digital now.