BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Actor Tom Hughes claims he’s not a rebel. But when the lad from northwest England won his way into London’s most prestigious drama school, he was determined to take a stand.

“You have to be a well-rounded person to be a good actor,” he says, seated in an overly air-conditioned meeting room in a hotel here. “You have to know people to portray people, and when I went to drama school, I was really keen to not lose who I was.”

They wanted him to substitute the snooty BBC accent for his baser northern sound. “I think they saw my career being nothing,” he says tapping the table top. “Looking back, I think it was tough love. They were hard on me because that would force me to work and that would help me to be more successful, but at the time I’m thinking, ‘No. I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to lose who I am.’ So I don’t think I lost touch. Though it advanced me and made me grow.”

It evidently worked. Hughes has been out of drama school for six years. In fact, he left two weeks early because he’d already landed a part. “I’ve had enough jobs to support me, and I think as a kid that was the main ambition,” he says.

“I wanted to be able to say to people, ‘I’m an actor.’ And they can’t laugh at me because it was a bit of a pipe dream.”

His pipe dream turned to reality with roles in “Trinity,” “The Hollow Crown,” “Dancing on the Edge,” and his latest, “The Game,” premiering Nov. 5. Hughes plays an enigmatic secret agent in England’s chess-like cold war with the Soviets in this six-part BBC America drama. When his character is contacted by a defecting KGB officer who tells him of a devious plot to destroy Britannia, he’s not sure if it’s true. But his boss (Brian Cox) rallies his team to ferret out members of the sleeper cells that pock 1970s England.

For a time, Hughes thought he’d be a musician. He began playing the guitar at 5. But three years later he landed the role of Mr. Fantastic Fox in the school play, “Mr. Fantastic Fox.” “It was mainly because I was the only one that was stupid enough to say I’d do it,” he smiles.

“I came offstage and I said to my mum, ‘I’ve never felt like this. I want to do this forever.’ I think when an 8-year-old says that — they say they want to be astronauts — they’ll change their minds. I never did.”

He spent his youth in amateur theater, but rarely saw movies. “I’d always instinctively been acting in a cinematic way anyway. I think a lot of kids, their passion is the theater. But I always wanted to bring things down. I never really had the desire to really fill a space. To me it was about making it truthful. I think that’s what film acting is about. I’m still learning, but that’s what it seems to be. You don’t have to reach the back of a 1,000-seat audience. It’s just about how honest are you?”

Hughes, 29, says he had to battle to be accepted at drama school, but for him it seemed the “Holy Grail.” Many of the schools thought he was too young. “They told me to go stomp grapes for a year.” So he took a year off in which he didn’t see a grape, but sold furniture. “All my mates were going off to university. I was just sitting around waiting.

“And I was taking a route that no one I knew had taken before. It was a bit of a risk. I was awful at selling furniture. I was really bad. I was working on commission. The point of being a salesman is you sell at all costs, but I just felt I couldn’t do it. ‘Would you like to buy this chair?’ ‘No.’ ‘OK, no problem. It’s not worth the money. Spend it on a holiday.’”

He says he never thought of the practicality of his choices. “If I’d had the sense to step back at the age of 14 and think of the percentage chance of this being how I pay my rent, the mathematician in me would’ve said it doesn’t compute. But you only get one shot at life, and if you’ve got a chance to even have a go, you have to have a go. I enjoy the surprise and the lack of structure. I can’t stand structure,” he says, waving his hands, palm down.

“In England it’s a tradition that everyone has a roast dinner, like meat and vegetables, potatoes and gravy on Sunday. I can’t get my head around it. I want meat on a Wednesday and a salad on Sunday. That was when I was 7, I used to beg my dad if we could eat something else. I’ve always wanted to break with tradition. I’ve never been happy with just accepting ‘this is the way things are.’”

Unmarried, Hughes doesn’t want to talk about his personal life. “For me it’s never been about marriage, it’s about being happy where you are,” he says. “It’s like anything. You can say: ‘Do I want to play James Bond one day?’ Well I don’t know, no one’s asked me.”