The Hackney boxer knocked out by his role with Rihanna

Thanks to Rihanna, 22-year-old model and actor Dudley O'Shaughnessy is the blue-eyed, sharp-cheekboned boy everybody is talking about. Not least because Rihanna herself commented, "I met him and I was like, let's f***ing kiss."

As the pair are reported to have met up since filming for supper and a shopping spree, and were photographed leaving Mahiki in London together, looking very happy in the back of a car, the world wants to know more about the person behind the undeniably beautiful face.

"Everyone has been surprised and shocked, but everybody is happy for me," says O'Shaughnessy, snacking on chocolate croissants in a meeting room at his agency, Next Model Management - his watery eyes still giving shy downward glances, despite his new heartthrob status.

Next signed O'Shaughnessy up as a model/actor 18 months ago, taking him on from a smaller agency which had scouted him at Old Street station when he was 19.

The agency does have an LA office, as might befit co-stars of Rihanna, but we're in Old Street, just a couple of miles from O'Shaughnessy's home in London Fields which he still shares with his mum. And a true east London boy he is.

"I grew up on a market stall," he explains. "My mum used to have a stall selling dresses in Camden My dad used to work with electrical stuff and repairs on Hackney market, so I'm all right at selling stuff."

His mum, who now works for an adventure playground off the Kingsland Road, "was a bit of a hippy", he says. "Born and raised in Chesham, she stepped out - dyed her hair pink. She would carry around a teapot as a handbag."

So it's clear where he gets his quirky sense of style from, and he doesn't deny it. "My mum helps me shop; she tells me what to wear."

Today he has put together a bowler hat with a red feather tucked into the band, aubergine trousers, a leather jacket and a hooded top with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles badges pinned onto the drawstring.

But his style wasn't always so refined. "All I used to wear was grey tracksuits," he says. "Sometimes I used to wash the top and not the bottoms, so the top would be a different colour. You'd have to get a new tracksuit so it looked the same."

This is his father's influence. Born in London (but of black-Irish heritage, hence the O'Shaughnessy name) his dad is a boxing coach. And it's a miracle, really, that O'Shaughnessy's model bone structure is still so perfectly in place, since up until a year ago he was a competitive boxer himself, winning the Amateur Boxing Association welterweight championships last year at York Hall in Bethnal Green.

"I was ranked number one in the country. I was a prospect for the Olympics," he explains. He still trains but not as much (his agency jokes that, in any case, slugs to the face would not be ideal).
"It wasn't me thinking I want to quit. I won the championship and still got overlooked by Team GB," says O'Shaughnessy. "I was down. When something is your dream and you do everything you need to do to get to your dream, but then you're still not getting picked, you think: 'What will I do?'

"I was thinking, I'm going to have to get a normal job now. I'll have to be a plumber or something."

But having decided that, in fact, he'd like to try his hand at acting, it was only a matter of time before his agency put him forward for the role in Rihanna's video - pitched at the agency as being much like a short film - and Rihanna personally picked O'Shaughnessy to be her love interest.

When his agent says, "The director, everyone, loved him. Obviously Rihanna loved him," O'Shaughnessy sniggers like a cheeky schoolboy - although he remains outwardly unruffled by the whole encounter.

"I wasn't starstruck at all She's just such a nice girl. It's not like just because she's achieved so much that she thinks her shit don't stink. She's such a humble, down-to-earth girl and that made it even better for me because I didn't feel intimidated or anything. We just got along. We were just like mates."

As for the sex scenes, "You've just got to get into it," he says, smothering a smile by taking a timely sip on a glass of orange juice.

"It took about three-and-a-half days to film. I loved it. I didn't want it to end. Not just because it was 'a certain person's' video but just because I love being on set," he explains.

Now he hopes to build on the video to secure film roles. His first short film, Loved One, about friendship, murder and youth culture, directed by Geri Spicer, has just had its first screening, and a documentary focusing on his boxing career is nearing completion. "Hopefully they're going to get into a film festival," he says.

Far more than when he talks about his hopes for future modelling campaigns with Givenchy and Burberry, he becomes truly animated when he talks about his dreams of being on screen.

"I don't want to do anything like East-Enders, I want to do film, or proper gritty TV. I'd like to do something with Guy Ritchie," he says, or a comic movie. "I'd like to be the villain, but the villain never wins" - that's his boxing spirit showing through. "This time the villain would have to win."

Although he also fancies himself as a bit of a teen heartthrob, like Robert Pattinson - "I want to do something like Twilight" - and it's not hard to imagine adoring fans lining up on the red carpet for a glimpse of him.

Those future fans will be glad to know O'Shaughnessy says he is, in fact, still single. "It's not that I'm looking [for a girlfriend] I don't want to say I want a girlfriend or I don't. If it happens, it happens."

Form an orderly queue.