How much fun was Nightsleeper to make?

A lot of fun. It was an interesting challenge because we were shooting in a studio just outside Glasgow. We were cooped up in these small carriages for 10, 12 hours a day and they’d pre-recorded the entirety of the train journey exteriors from Aberdeen to London on LED screens, which were outside the train. I've often been fortunate enough to work in real environments a lot, but this was all pretend, so it was a different way of doing things.

Could you see where the train was supposed to be in the UK while you were filming?

Yeah, although it was dark so you couldn’t really see much. They used it for the lighting in the windows on our faces a little bit here and there, which saves a lot of time in the edit and just looks better and more realistic. Although because you feel like you're on a train, people were getting motion sickness if they looked out of the window for too long.

When you're all confined for that long, how do you avoid going mad?

I actually thought it benefited the show. We're all there all day together, all in the same green room with everyone running about changing mics and what have you, so you just couldn't escape this absolute chaos. It was all part of the fun.

What does telling the story in real time bring?

An immediacy and an energy. Having seen the first episode, that clock ticking like Speed or 24 creates a tension.

Is Joe comfortable being a lone wolf or does he prefer working with people?

The whole show is about everyone doing their bit and working as a team to stop this train. Joe is a great leader of teams and a galvaniser of people although, at the beginning of this, he is a lone wolf. Gradually, he learns to cooperate and work with everybody else – he realises that if not everybody is on board, pardon the pun, then he’s not going to be able to stop the train.

Could you relate to Joe?

I tried to bring the fun, cheeky bit of myself to this role because a lot of the action heroes are just big hardmen with gruff voices. I tried to be free with it and play a real person, warts and all. I don't have kids although I've got younger brothers that I'm very close to. Hopefully, the audience will try and put themselves in the shoes of the characters in the show and try to see who they would be within that group of people. We all want to hope we'd be the one that steps up and runs about and saves the day, but would we really? I’d like to think I’d be more like Joe in that moment, but that's probably because I've done all these different movies so weirdly, I sometimes feel like an action hero.

When Joe first realises something is seriously wrong, does he feel equipped to react to the crisis or out of his depth?

He’s sort of figuring it out as he goes along. Obviously he has some skills and a basic level of training because he's worked in police force. But this particular incident is quite far out of his field of expertise so he's relying closely on Abby (Aysgarth, played by Alexandra Roach) at the other end of the phone to assist. They don’t have much time to figure out whether they can trust each other, they just have to get on with trying to get to the bottom of what's happening. Joe grows into the role as the show goes on.

Could you talk about building that relationship with Alexandra?

It was about trying to create some rapport between myself and Alex Roach. I know her personally, but we never actually met for this because we weren’t in the scenes together. We were trying to create some sort of relationship over the phone, although I've just got someone reading in while I'm talking into a prop phone. It’s a different challenge when you can't look somebody in the eye. You gain so much from somebody through their physical being and their eyes, because you can read their emotions non-verbally. When you're on the phone, you sometimes have to perform a little bit more to create some energy. You can't just talk in a monotonous tone.

Does Joe bond with any of his fellow passengers?

He bonds with the young kid Mouse (Adam Mitchell) because he reminds Joe of his own son, so we see some of Joe’s paternal qualities. One of the staff, Billy (Scott Reid), becomes quite useful, as do a couple of others with the more physical elements, and Joe uses one of the one of the guys on the train that knows the train well.

Was it fun to play off all those different actors in a small space?

Yeah, there are some amazing actors in that cast: Sharon Small, James Cosmo, Alex Ferns… Everybody brings something different, and they’re funny as well, so it was a joy. Hopefully, we're creating a picture of what it might look like in the UK on one of these trains: ordinary people in an extraordinary circumstance having to step outside their comfort zone and save the day. That's why I'm looking forward to it, because hopefully people in the UK will really be able to relate to these characters.

How do you feel about train travel now?

I had a stag do in Glasgow not long after the shoot and quite a lot of the lads got the night sleeper up there. I was like, Guys, do not get on that thing… I think they had a pretty rough journey and were knackered the whole trip. But it hasn’t put me off trains!