Justin Timberlake the social climber

E HAS ruled the pop charts and won truckloads of Grammys – now Justin Timberlake wants Hollywood stardom and he wants it bad.

But the 29-year-old is the first to admit he has a misconception mountain to conquer – that whole boy band, Britney-lover, Cry Me a River thing.

“People seem to find if you do one thing really well there is no way you can do something else,” he says.

“You get a lot of doubt.”

Any questions about his acting potential, however, have been silenced by The Social Network. In the film, about the birth of Facebook, Timberlake plays Napster creator and Silicon Valley hedonist Sean Parker.

Parker himself declared of Timberlake’s turn in the film: “It’s a great performance of a character that isn’t me”.

The moment he read the script, Timberlake didn’t just want, but needed the part.

“It’s not every day you read something so complete and so dazzling,” he says. “I was blown away. It was almost dizzying. I asked to be able to please get into the audition room.”

Once in the room, he faced a battle of nerves triggered by the presence of director David Fincher (Se7en) and writer Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing).

“The most nerve-wracking part I didn’t account for was walking in and sitting with Aaron reading the dialogue with him,” Timberlake says.

“It’s like Paul Simon wrote a song for you and you have to walk in and sing it right in front of him. In a childlike way I was just enamoured with them. I will say this: you benefit yourself as an actor by saying what Aaron wrote.”

Sorkin and Fincher, on the other hand, did their best to dismiss Timberlake as just another pop idol desperate to act. Once word had spread through Hollywood that the Sorkin-Fincher dream-team was at the helm of the Facebook movie, they were swamped “with hundreds and hundreds” of young male actors wanting in. “We had our pick,” Fincher says.

Zombieland’s Jesse Eisenberg was picked to play Facebook figurehead Mark Zuckerberg. English actor Andrew Garfield, who has since been crowned Spider-Man, came on board as Zuckerberg’s business partner Eduardo Saverin.

The writer and director then put Timberlake through a rigorous series of auditions, but each time, his talent blew them away.

“Justin Timberlake had to overcome his own fame to get a part in the movie,” Sorkin says.

“We were putting together the best ensemble cast of young actors. Justin is a worldwide mega pop star who was upsetting that apple cart.

“Even though every time he came in to audition he was greater than the time before, no one had to work harder to get this part than Justin did. We kept calling him in to audition in the hope he would do something that would finally make us feel good about saying, ‘You’re not going to get the part’.

“But that never happened. He kept making a more and more convincing case.”

Timberlake the superstar quickly fades into Sean Parker in The Social Network – in all the internet mogul’s self-sabotaging, paranoid glory.

“I met him briefly,” Timberlake says of bumping into Parker in a LA club. “When I met him I hadn’t been cast.

“I saw the character as it existed in the script. I think it would be irresponsible to place all of that on him as a person because I don’t know him.

“I want to be clear that I didn’t play him as a person. That would have been lazy as an actor. You have to be imaginative after the relative.”

Wearing a pair of intellectual but expensive glasses and a navy blue suit jacket – “It’s by my friend J. Lindberg,” he says – Timberlake is the definition of geek chic.

Yet, while his Saturday Night Live spoofs have notched millions of YouTube views, when it comes to the latest technology, Timberlake likes to keep it old-school.

He is “too busy” to use Facebook, is on Twitter rarely and prefers the old-fashioned telephone to connect with his friends – who he says he can count “on one hand”.

“Social networking is the new rock ‘n’ roll,” he says. “It affords kids the time to waste. I’m so thankful I wasn’t in my youth anymore when it was invented. But when you’re young, you’re young and you find ways to waste time.

“I look at it as an outsider who doesn’t use it that much and wonder how good or how bad it will be in the end. I don’t think it will ever stop.”

Timberlake has little time to waste poking people online.

He has just filmed the comedy Bad Teacher with his former flame Cameron Diaz, lead the rom-com Friends With Benefits and will be the voice of Boo-Boo Bear in next year’s Yogi Bear movie.

“I could have done a movie about some guy who used his singing voice to save the world or something stupid,” he says.

“But when I started off as a kid I started as a sketch comedy actor. More than I was a singer, acting came more naturally to me. Acting was my first job.”

Even SexyBack JT was a construct, he says.

“FutureSex/LoveSounds was a character. It was a fun thing to do on stage. Whatever personality or bravado came out of that was acting.

“I started off in a TV show and I honestly feel luckier to have become a musician because I didn’t think that would ever pan out for me.”