URGED not to go into acting by his teachers, Scott Chambers has proved all the doubters wrong.

"The thing is," he tells me, "a lot of my teachers at school and at college kept on saying to me I wasn't good enough to be an actor. They were all very nice about it but basically that I wasn't going to make it.

"Perhaps that's what made me more determined."

I suspect it was a bit of that and quite a bit of talent as well because you don't make the shortlist for best breakthrough actor on determination alone.

Scott was one of 12 actors, including Downton Abbey's Laura Carmichael, who were listed by BIFA, the British Independent Film Awards, as the most promising newcomers in 2015.

He got the nod for his breathtaking performance as Richard in Chicken, which after doing the rounds on the international film circuit gets its official UK release later this month.

"It's just been absolutely crazy," he adds. "I didn't expect anything like the attention it's got and when people talk about my performance in it I do feel really honoured if not a little weird."

After it's premiere in London and then the Firstsite Art Gallery in Colchester in 2014, Chicken has been in competition at the Edinburgh Film Festival, the New Hampshire Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Award, and the Busan Film Festival in South Korea.

"Busan was insane," Scott laughs. "They make a huge deal of all the entrants and I've never had an experience like it. New Hampshire was great as well. Being in the same room as Robert Eggers who made The Witch was a real moment for us. To be with those kind of people is a pretty big deal."

But then Scott has already had the likes of Sir Ian McKellen commenting on his performance as Richard, describing it as enchanting.

Born and brought up in Colchester, Scott got the part of Richard, who has special needs, after being cast in the original play the film was based on at the Southwark Playhouse in London.

By coincidence that play was written by another actor from Colchester, Freddie Machin, who also has a cameo in the film.

"It was like it was meant to be," Scott jokes. "Up until then I had only done a few short films and I just wanted to do a bit of stage work.

"The director of the film, Joe Stephenson, came along to see the play and liked the character I was playing. I think he really fell in love with Richard saying that usually those kinds of characters don't get a voice in cinema and he felt that Richard's story needed to be told."

Set in and around the Essex/Suffolk border, close by to where Freddie Machin grew up, Chicken tells the story of brothers Richard and Polly, who live in a caravan on someone else’s land but find their lives turned upside down with the arrival of a new landowner and his family.

Although peppered with dozens of local references, the film was actually shot in Dorking, Surrey.

"To be honest," Scott begins, "I was so nervous. I kept ringing up Joe telling him I was worried about this and that, and asking him whether I should watch all these other films that had characters with special needs in them. But Joe was brilliant. Whatever he does next, I want to be a part of it. We spent hours and hours on the phone talking about Richard and then with the guy playing Polly, Morgan Watkins, I worked out a huge back story for him. We also had a week and a half's rehearsal before the shoot began, which is unusual for a film like this one."

The director even let Scott and Morgan improvise some of the scenes.

"There was one time," he continues, "where I'm distraught, crying and drunk and Joe just let me go for five minutes. He's that kind of director.

"It was a three-week shoot and genuinely I didn't want it to end. Everyone involved was absolutely on it and so inspiring it made me think 'this is why I want to do acting'."

Scott's interest in acting started at an early age when his older brother showed him the classic slasher horror, Scream.

"I just remember him telling me, it's not real, it's not real, they're all actors, it's just a job" Scott says, "and I thought to myself 'that's a job I want to do'.

"From then on I've tried to do acting whenever I could even at school when I used to write scripts from my friends and class mates. They must have really hated me."

Later while at Stanway School and then the Sixth Form College, he discovered Stagecoach performing arts school but could only stay there for a year because he was too old.

After getting a BTEC national diploma in acting from Colchester Institute, Scott then ignored the advice of his tutors and began going up to London to take 'acting in front of the camera' classes.

"Eventually I moved to London," he adds, "and started doing adverts to pay the bills while I did short films for free on the side. But then the agent I was with went bust and I lost a lot of money. If it wasn't for Chicken, I don't know what I would be doing now."

Since then Scott has been keeping himself very busy.

He's about to shoot another 'big' feature, which he's not allowed to tell me anything about and has just finished working on a horror flick called Foxtrap, which was directed by another Colchester filmmaker Jamie Weston.

"Which was another huge coincidence," Scott tells me. "I think it was meant to be directed by someone else and they had to pull out so when I saw it was Jamie taking over it was like 'Jamie, yeah I've known this guy for years, this is going to be really good fun'.

"I'm only in the opening scene but it was so much fun. We really went for it and I was covered in so much bad when I got the train back home, I thought 'actually, this looks pretty bad. I better get changed'."

Chicken gets released in selected cinemas on March 20.

For more information go to www.chickenthefilm.com