As he stars alongside Olivia Colman in a drama about the Mansfield Murders, the actor talks about his discomfort with Naked, doing night shoots with Julie Walters – and growing old grotesquely

David Thewlis, speaking by Zoom from his home in the Berkshire village of Sunningdale, has set his screen at a jaunty angle. His manner is equable, nerdy, eager to please. Nothing like what you’d expect, in other words – unless you had watched Landscapers, a new four-part TV drama in which Thewlis stars opposite Olivia Colman. Perhaps he’s one of those actors who doesn’t de-role until he’s on to the next character.

Landscapers is true crime, in so far as the protagonists are Susan and Christopher Edwards, the so-called Mansfield Murderers convicted in 2014 of killing Susan’s parents and burying them in the garden 15 years before. Yet it is absolutely nothing like true crime. It jumps through time and genre, smashes the fourth wall then puts it back together as a jail cell. It is vividly experimental yet recalls the golden age of British TV, specifically Dennis Potter and his dreamlike, restless theatricality. “I didn’t think of that while we were making it,” says Thewlis. “But when I saw it, I thought of The Singing Detective – which I was in!”