Richard Ayoade is swapping the quick wit of The IT Crowd for more serious territory as he joins academics to discuss his movie adaptation of a Russian classic.

The star has agreed to talk about his version of Dostoyevsky’s The Double starring Jesse Eisenberg - his second outing as a director - with thinkers including former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams as part of a public festival organised by King’s College, London.

The actor is a star guest along with fellow comedian Robert Newman at the festival, but feels he won't be as interesting as the other panellists.

He said: “I think I will be the person with the least interesting thing to say there by an uncomfortably large margin but I’m very interested to hear what the others might say.”

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Ayoade admits he is a bashful interviewee to the extent that his next project, Ayoade on Ayoade, is a comic book in which he attempts to interview himself as a film-maker.

“It’s not a genuine inquiry. It seemed to me to be funny if someone like me was treated with the reverence of [the Russian director Andrei] Tarkovsky,” he said.

He appeared alongside Russell Crowe and Cameron Diaz on the Graham Norton Show to publicise The Double where he was barely asked a question. “It is so weird that people who have never met and will never meet again pretending to sit on a sofa talking about their lives as if it’s a perfectly natural thing to do. It does seem to be pretty ludicrous to be sitting next to Russell Crowe talking about [the film] Noah.”

Arts and Humanities Festival: underground is at the Arts and Humanities Research Institute at King’s College London on its Strand campis from October 15 to 24. www.kcl.ac.uk/ahfest