What drew you to The Listeners?

For me it always starts with the script and the story. Who the person is, and what their struggles and obstacles are in life. It’s important for me to see a way into that, and does it feel like it chimes with things that I recognise now or things I feel I might recognise in the future. The scripts were amazing, and the writing is wonderful. It was an exciting combination of character, script, and creative collaborators.

Tell us a bit about Paul and his journey throughout the series?

Paul is a suburban family person. He and Claire got married relatively young in modern speak, and they’re at the stage of a relationship where their daughter, Ashley, is soon to be moving out into the world and they’ve got to work out what the next phase of their relationship is. Paul works in construction and a facet of that is something to do with surveying. I’ve found it quite useful with this job to not find specifics. In the past, I’ve tried to charter the journey, but there’s something about the world of this series which is poised in this weird orbit and feels slightly apart from reality. It has been quite good to just almost cut all the strings, play the moments and let those things just be questions, responding to human emotional logic rather than the practical real world.

What was interesting to me about this character is how Paul goes through discovery of how far away two people can be, and how frightening, isolating, and dangerous that is to a relationship, which is quite a lot to go through in about forty to fifty days, twenty years into a relationship. It’s kind of like a cold immersion.

What were your initial thoughts when you read the scripts, had you read the book?

I’d come across Jordan’s work as a playwright and loved it. I made the decision to read the first few chapters of the book and decided not to finish it or research where the story goes, because the show was sort of being shot sequentially.

When I read the final episode, it was all new information to me. I try to not get too involved with what’s happening with other characters on their journeys because I feel it’s important to just know the bits that your character knows to avoid telling bits of the story in your performance that your character wouldn’t have access to. This feels like a much closer representation of living life where you’re guessing, and people are living whole universes of lives that you just have no sense of. I’ve found in recent times that it’s easier to not play the ending if you don’t know the ending.

How is the family unit affected by The Hum?

They’re practical and puzzled at first. Then, there’s a sense of wanting to believe Claire, but it becomes increasingly hard for it to not be about other things. In a way, The Hum is a kind of MacGuffin at the heart of this, which questions how people in family units find external things in life that intrigue them and further explore them. The fundamental challenge of parenthood is the reality that a child is always going to find their own world. And so they hold on to this practical thing, a sound. The characters don’t know what it is, but they have a sense that they will find out and it becomes about a need rather than a sound. I think it may be that they know that this thing is happening to her, but they don’t know why or what it is.

What are Paul’s thoughts on the group who hear The Hum?

He meets them and finds them quite bewildering, and he can’t work out why Claire would want to disconnect from her family. Because he doesn’t understand or have an emotionally empathetic grip on what The Hum is doing as an isolating force and a thing that’s pushing them all together. He can’t get why she wants to move into this phase of life with these strangers. I think it’s a huge puzzle for him. In a way, you can get your head around an affair but this is really strange.

How would Paul have reacted to hearing The Hum?

I think he would have been very practical about seeking out the source, bought sound metres and done full decibel studies to map out the whole thing. He would have absolutely resisted the possibility that it was in some way either self-generated, or psychologically mediated or something that was unmeasurable. I think he would have resisted it a lot longer than Claire.

What do you think the viewers are going to get from watching the show?

I hope the audience will be entertained and gripped by it, and fundamentally I hope they’ll see real people in what feels close to a real environment, enough for them to feel like it’s a sort of a Narnia portal from their own worlds. The thing that I hope will make this show gripping, interesting and thrilling is its proximity to reality without quite feeling like it’s real.

Produced by Element Pictures (Normal People, The Favourite, Poor Things), a Fremantle company, and directed by Janicza Bravo (Zola, Poker Face, Mrs America) for BBC One and BBC iPlayer, The Listeners centres around Claire (Rebecca Hall), a popular English teacher, who begins to hear a low humming sound that no one else around her can hear.

This seemingly innocuous noise gradually upsets the balance of her life, increasing tension between herself and her husband, Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah), and daughter, Ashley (Mia Tharia). But despite multiple doctors, no obvious source or medical cause can be found. When she discovers that a student of hers, Kyle (Ollie West), can also hear the sound, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families, friends and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of neighbours, led by a charismatic couple, Jo (Gayle Rankin) and Omar (Amr Waked), who also claim they can hear what they call “The Hum” – but rather than track down the source to stop it, believe it is a gift, heard only by a “chosen few.”

Enigmatic, provocative, and haunting, The Listeners explores the seduction of the wild and unknowable, the human search for the transcendent, the rise of conspiracy culture in the West, and the desire for community and connection in our increasingly polarised times.

Watch The Listeners on BBC iPlayer on Tuesday 19 November from 6am and on BBC One from 9pm that night.

Based on the book, The Listeners, by Jordan Tannahill (https://amzn.to/48RExkZ)