In person, Jorge, 35, resembles not at all the hapless explosives expert Pele Dos Santos, who spends Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou wearing a funny red woollen hat and crooning old David Bowie songs in Portuguese. The Seu Jorge that saunters into the hotel lobby is tall, slender, stitched into a tight black suit, and topped with an eruption of dreadlocks more becoming his parallel career as a musician - a musician who, prior to being offered the role of Santos, did not number Bowie among his influences.

"No," he says. "I only knew Let's Dance." Rather charmingly, he sings a bit of this by way of illustration.

The night before, Jorge had played at a party to launch the DVD of The Life Aquatic. His set had been a mix of the upbeat Brazilian pop that dominates his current album, Cru, and Bowie songs from the film. Even removed from Anderson's whimsical parallel universe for which they provided a soundtrack, Jorge's interpretations sounded lovely - with Bowie's daft cosmic doggerel removed, and with Jorge's languid croon added, the tunes assume an otherworldly life of their own, Life On Mars and Rebel Rebel in particular. I'd wondered, though, if translation had been a problem (Jorge does interviews with a translator - his English is better than he thinks it is, but he's not confident).

"I changed the words quite a lot," he says. "I wanted each song to be about a different character. So, Lady Stardust is about Ned Plimpton [Owen Wilson's character] wanting to be a good father, and Changes is about Steve Zissou [Bill Murray's thinly-veiled homage to Jacques Cousteau] changing himself as a person, although nobody who doesn't speak Portuguese is going to know that."

Jorge came to the attention of Wes Anderson, and everyone else, via City Of God - the 2002 film set in the infamous slums (favelas) of Rio. For much of the cast, imagining themselves into their roles wasn't difficult. The visceral verite of City Of God sprang from its deployment of residents of the favelas, of whom Jorge was one. He has made the leap from Rio's violent, squalid back-blocks to an A-list ensemble cast - The Life Aquatic starred, aside from Murray and Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Willem Defoe, Anjelica Houston, Jeff Goldblum and Michael Gambon - with remarkable insouciance.

"The other actors were ... curious," he smiles. "They wanted to know if the favelas are really like that. I said unfortunately they're much worse."

He stresses, however, that the past interests him less than the future. Hyperactively twitchy even as he sits and talks, he has more songs he wants to sing, and more films he wants to make, one in particular.

"My father," he explains, "is a big fan of westerns. I'd love to be able to bring him to the cinema to see a western with me in it."