Tell me about Man in an Orange Shirt? How did it first come to you?
I was doing a play at the National called Platonov, and I had a gap of a couple of months before my next job. I was thinking, oh good, but then my agent - the tenacious woman that she is, said no - you should read this script. I read it and I was hooked. It wasn’t patronising. It was romantic, which I was surprised at and glad about.

Do you think it is a love story?
Yeah - I hope so. I was a bit annoyed when it was announced and people kept saying it was the BBC doing a ‘gay drama’, because you wouldn’t call Romeo and Juliet a heterosexual drama, you would just call it a love story. This is not a homosexual drama, it is a love story between these two men. It is just a love story that happens to be set in the 1940s, where it was illegal for them to be themselves.

Tell us about your character
I play a character called Thomas March who is an artist, a war artist. When he's not painting soldiers he lives a sort of bohemian lifestyle in London. He falls in love with Captain Michael Berryman - they have this huge, whirlwind romance and Thomas falls hook line and sinker and it sort of defines his whole life, he can’t quite escape it. Thomas is much more confident about who he is and is not afraid to be himself, in a world which rejects him. Whereas Michael - unfortunately for Thomas - wants to go back on the heteronormative path and that leaves Thomas heartbroken. Thomas just gets sadder and lonelier.