Bringing together a werewolf, a vampire and a ghost in the same house seems to be a winning idea for BBC3. Viv Hardwick reports.

A SEVEN-FOOT animatronics werewolf, two prosthetic heads and a prosthetic torso are required for Russell Tovey’s transformation into a mythical beast for new BBC drama Being Human.

And he’s only one-third of the disturbing occupants of a Bristol house where his friend Mitchell (played by Aidan Turner) is a vampire and house-sharer Annie (Leonora Crichlow) is a ghost.

The BBC3 series premiered with a pilot last year and is now a six-parter starting on Sunday.

Tovey, who was rumoured to be in the running to replace David Tennant as Doctor Who, dubs the drama “as a kind of This Life, Cold Feet and Buffy”.

The actor, best known for his role in Alan Bennet’s stage/film drama The History Boys and an appearance in Doctor Who, says of George: “He’s a screwed-up fellow but he’s also got a heart of gold, he’s a sweetheart and he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. I think people will find him a bit odd, but he’s very endearing.

“He just wants to be normal and I suppose a lot of people in life struggle with this if they’re somehow different. They just want to be normal, but the point is, what is the norm?”

Turning into a werewolf is a multi-stage process and Tovey says: “It starts off with me, then me with fake teeth and contact lenses, then I’ve got hair laid on to make my face look hairier.

The next stage is me with a prosthetic neck, then there’s two different prosthetic heads and a prosthetic torso. It’s mad, when we were watching a playback of it I though ‘is that me? On no that’s the head!’ because it looks incredibly real.”

He admits that it took some getting used to when he had to run around naked in the freezing cold woods being accompanied by a 20-strong film crew.

“I’m playing a Jew in this, but I’m not Jewish so I don’t think they’ll ever be showing any full frontal shots – I’m not that much into method acting. Once you’ve been filmed naked you become normal with it. I filmed one scene and they gave me the option to film it with my clothes on and I just said ‘Let’s do it with the clothes off, eh?”

On hospital porter George’s relationship with his housemates, Tovey explains that vampire Mitchell, who is 118 years old, is an odd couple set-up in many ways. “George loves Mitchell to pieces, but he has a problem with him in the fact that Mitchell seems to be sorted and cool, calm and collected, whereas George is this neurotic Jewish, slightly camp at times guy. They have a kind of odd couple relationship,” he says.

Sharing a house with a dead person proves to be more complicated.

“It’s complete sod’s law to George, moving into a house to be normal and then there’s a ghost. So I think for George his relationship towards Annie is slight resentment and a slight annoyance.

He’s always battling against her being around because it doesn’t fit his quotas of what he wants to be the norm.”

In the pilot version, Newcastle-born Andrea Riseborough originally played Annie while Mitchell was portrayed by Guy Flanagan.

On becoming vampire Mitchell, Aidan Turner says of Being Human: “When tackling a supernatural subject I sometimes find if difficult to invest in the characters because they don’t really exist – but there’s so much heart in this story, so much reality, it’s easy to relate to the characters.

“They’re not flying around putting spells on people, they work in the hospital, live in a flat together, watch TV and go to clubs. I hope that people watching think ‘I’d like them to be my friend’. I think that’s important.”

He admits that playing a vampire had big appeal.

“Everyone wants to play a vampire. I look a bit like a vampire and when you research into vampires there are all these cults around the world that are influenced by them one way or another, so that was a really interesting aspect to discover.

“Everyone has a dark side that they don’t expose too often, but when they do, you know about it.”