And his star power is about to pump up another notch with the role of 1970s protester Raven in the new Flemish film My Queen Karo. Director Dorothée van den Berghe asked the 31-year-old actor back after working with him on her first film, 2002’s Meisje. “It’s the first time that’s ever happened to me,” Schoenaerts tells me. “It’s a heart-warming experience to be asked again by the same director. It makes me feel humble.”

To avoid “burnout”, Schoenaerts is taking a few months off before starting a new film next March. “I want to have time to prepare myself,” he explains. “The last two years were so busy I’ve just decided not to do anything until then – to be starving again. You need to be ‘hungry’ to start a project. If you’re overfed, it’s just another meal. But if you’re hungry, you’re like, ‘I’m going to eat it all!’ And I’m really looking forward to the next project, so I want to be completely in the zone for it.”

That film, Rundskop (Beef Head), is about hormone trafficking (with a nod to the reallife case that shocked Belgium in the early 1990s). Schoenaerts this year shot Pulsar, which will be released sometime next year. He plays a man driven to a breakdown by the energy from all his communication devices.

The son of the late Flemish actor Julien Schoenaerts, he is drawn to roles that are ambiguous – avoiding the “good guy, bad guy” cliché. In My Queen Karo, which is released this week across Flanders, his character thinks he’s doing everyone a favour by deciding what’s best for them. Fighting against the establishment in Amsterdam, “he ends up becoming what he hates,” says Schoenaerts. “There is an authentic and honest side to him, but also a very selfish side. I like roles where there is a contradiction going on – that have some kind of connection with people who I see in my everyday life. People are never just ‘this’ or ‘that’; people are many things at the same time.”