BEVERLY HILLS, California - It's news to Alex Pettyfer that in June 2009, he was named one of Britain's 50 most eligible bachelors.

A British women's magazine called Company bestowed that honour on him. Yet Pettyfer was only 19 at a time.

Two months later, a more prestigious magazine, Glamour, ranked him Number 21 on their list of the sexiest men on the planet.

That also comes as news to the rising young British actor. He finds the whole business hilarious.

"The things that you say to me at this moment are the things I'm hearing for the first time," Pettyfer tells Postmedia News. "So I laugh with amusement because it really is the first time I've ever heard this."

Still, silly as such hype may be, he figures he might as well give it a positive spin.

"So I very much appreciate it!" he grins. "Being in the top 50 is better than being 51 - let's put it that way!"

Actually Pettyfer, now 20 and officially out of his teens, is very much in the numbers game at the moment. That's because of the Feb. 18 premiere of his first major film, I Am Number Four. In this unusual new suspense thriller, he plays John Smith, a fugitive on the run from enemies intent on destroying him. He's the fourth on their mysterious list of victims, and in a further desperate attempt to escape them, he has changed his identity one more time, and vanished into the obscurity of a high school in a small Ohio town.

John looks like a human. He feels like a human. But actually he's an alien seeking to fit into high school life and remain safe from the black-clad alien death squad assigned to murder him. He's also struggling to control the telekinetic powers which are emerging within him and which come to his defence when his enemies again catch up with him.

There's a huge marketing effort underway on behalf of I Am Number Four, which is based on a best-selling novel by Pittacus Lore, and has the potential - or so Disney and DreamWorks hope - to evolve into a lucrative film franchise.

Stardom is looming for Pettyfer - not bad for a guy who only began acting professionally five years ago in a British TV film version of Tom Brown's School. Indeed, less than a month after I Am Number Four opens, he'll be showing up in another film generating a lot of attention - Beastly, a high school variation on Beauty and the Beast with Pettyfer playing the Beast.

What's most intriguing about Pettyfer at this stage of career is his disinterest in the amount of buzz surrounding him. He honestly didn't know he'd become the darling of some women's magazines. As for the Internet . . .

"Are there really Alex Pettyfer fan sites?" he asks with genuine surprise. The very idea makes him smile. "I don't read what the Internet has to say about Alex Pettyfer."

So if tabloid sites are currently gossiping about the fact that he and his Number co-star - Dianna Agron of Glee fame - are now a romantic item, he'd rather not hear about it. But he is amused to know that Wikipedia thinks that his father is an actor, his mother a former model and that he himself had a successful career as a child model. None of which is true, he says firmly.

Still he knows that something remarkable is happening to him, and that he needs to figure out how to control it.

"How real does it seem to me? I think it's something you can never grasp, and I think that as someone who lives in Fairyland. Because this is Lalaland, you make it as real as you want to. I think I'm a small-town boy in a big place with big fish, and you don't not take advantage of the opportunities that are given to you."

In the case of I Am Number Four, Pettyfer almost backed out of his reading for director D.J. Caruso and producer Michael Bay.

"I didn't want to upset the fans or D.J., so with much respect I tried not to audition."

Than he realized he was being foolish.

"I couldn't miss an opportunity like this, so I decided I was hopefully going to make the most of it."

At the time, he feels he was just being realistic. Insecurity had nothing to do with it.

"I think you have to be very secure as an actor to escape yourself - to revisit someone's past, whether you're portraying another person or creating someone, and then to come back to who you are and not bring those emotions with you."

For him, part of the appeal of I Am Number Four came from the action scenes and the chance to do his own stunts.

"I did everything," says Pettyfer, who still winces at the memory of being slammed against a high school locker at one ferocious moment in the film. "I had two months' training beforehand. D.J. is a very hands-on director and is literally by your side every moment. And he creates these phenomenal sets and phenomenal situations and sticks you in the middle - and you don't realize you're in a movie anymore.'

But Pettyfer also feels that the movie is ultimately a character-based story - and that he really liked.

"John Smith is at a point in his life where he has a choice and his dilemma is that he wants to be a normal kid but has been given this destiny of becoming a warrior. He's initially very reluctant and has a James Dean Rebel-Without-a-Cause outlook. He has the kind of temperament you feel could explode at any moment . . . A lot of kids are going to relate to what he is going through in the story . . . ."

His film choices are eclectic, and that's the way he likes it. After Beastly, he'll be showing up in the dark thriller, Now, opposite Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake, for release in September. Then he hopes to don his producer's hat and make a film about legendary racing driver James Hunt.

"I choose great stories that I love," he says simply. "And I've tried to choose different things because I want to keep things new and fresh."

He feels tremendously lucky, but he's wary of the trappings of success. The late Paul Newman, an iconic actor with little use for the trappings of fame, is his role model. Five years from now, he hopes he'll be a successful enough to do the type of humanitarian work that dominated Newman's final years. The trappings of stardom, he insists don't interest him.

But for the time being, the priority is to maintain his emotional equilibrium as his career takes off and the glare of publicity intensifies.

"I think I'm a very normal guy, but I live in a world which is very abnormal. So to find grounding and keep your feet on the ground is very important so you don't drift off in this currency of crap."