Robert Aramayo on the BAFTA N-Word Incident and the Wolverine Whisper Campaign

Robert Aramayo won two BAFTAs in one night for a film most of America hadn't seen. On Feb. 22, the 33-year-old from Hull took both the Rising Star Award and leading actor at the 79th BAFTA Film Awards, beating Timothée Chalamet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ethan Hawke and Michael B. Jordan. Nobody had ever won both in the same night. Sony Pictures Classics didn't open "I Swear" stateside until April 24, making it eligible for this year's Oscar race against Andrew Scott, John Malkovich, Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon.

Kirk Jones' biographical drama about Scottish Tourette's campaigner John Davidson opened in the U.K. last October and arrived at BAFTA with five nominations. Then the ceremony itself intervened. Davidson, attending as executive producer, sat near a live microphone; his involuntary vocal tics, including a racial slur, were heard on the broadcast while Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented. BAFTA apologized to the presenters. Davidson left on his own in the second half and told Variety he felt "a wave of shame." For weeks, the discourse swallowed the film whole.

What does Aramayo say about the incident?

He isn't relitigating. He is defending the man he spent three months with before cameras rolled and now counts as a close friend. "If John were here now, he might hit you," Aramayo told Variety. "That will hurt you. It will also hurt John because he's hit you."

He keeps returning to one line from his research: "Tourette's is funny until it's not." Some tics make a room laugh. Some hurt. "All those responses are human responses," he said. "But at the same time, I see John and his experience and I know how difficult it is for him."

When the envelope opened, Davidson was the first face he saw backstage. "He was waiting for me, and we had this massive hug," Aramayo recalled. He describes the win itself as fragments: a blur, a staircase, no speech. "There are honestly moments between them and me walking off the stage that I don't remember."

How did he approach playing Davidson?

The script scared him — we can thank Robert Downey Jr.'s Sean Penn speech in "Tropic Thunder" for scaring every actor who takes on a disabled character. The backing of the charities Tourette Scotland and Tourettes Action helped, and Davidson's blessing honored him. Nothing made him calm.

His education was enormous. Research revealed the social isolation of people whose tics aren't overt, the chronic pain of repetitive motions, and the fact that the same tic reads differently from a 12-year-old than a 55-year-old. Some people he met even wished they had coprolalia (the involuntary utterance of taboo words) because it's so identifiable. One maxim stuck: "If you've met one person with Tourette's, you've met one person with Tourette's."

His verdict on the film's aim: "This isn't a story about Tourette's. It's a story about John and all of the given circumstances that surround John." The Tourette Association of America told him one in 50 American kids lives with a persistent tic disorder, and one in 160 with Tourette's.

What else is on the slate?

Peter Mullan, his co-star, once greeted an improvised line with "Wow, OK, this is a lot." A third season of "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" is coming — darker, with Sauron out in the open, and the shortest shoot so far. Paul Thomas Anderson remains the director he'd most want, and most fear: "I don't even know if I'd want to work with him because I'd be scared of letting him down."

And Wolverine? Variety pitched him for the role whenever Hugh Jackman hangs up the claws. He didn't say no. "You're not the first person who's said it, though." He also revealed he and Christopher Abbott — Marvel's new Charles Xavier — share a PR rep. Coincidence, presumably. He's "working on something" he can't discuss, which is how these things always start.