I do feel there’s less of a stigma about soap actors these days...

Ben) who, after an encounter with a ghostly woman dressed in all white on a moonlit road, soon finds himself drawn into a mysterious and disturbing world.

For Ben, the 19th century classic is another tick off the proverbial bucket list.

“I’ve always been a fan of BBC drama growing up. I’d always watch it in my household with my family, every Sunday night,” he begins.

“It’s part of my upbringing, so it’s definitely something I’ve always wanted to do.

“I wasn’t keen on the idea of doing a Victorian piece because I’d recently done a film called Mary Shelley, which was set in a similar time period,” he insists. “But what really struck me about The Woman In White was just how ahead of its time it was.

“The actual themes of the piece, they’re more relevant now than they were when we filmed.

“This idea of these two women living freely within the strict structure of Victorian society, and then a heinous patriarch coming in and spoiling everything...” he says. “It felt very relevant and I think it’s always important to choose something relevant, ideally.”

As for the visual mode: “It’s very filmic, very Gothic, and it’s very high-quality,” he notes, his co-stars including the likes of Jessie Buckley, Olivia Vinall and Charles Dance.

“There’s so much suspense and I think it does keep you on the edge of your seat too. A lot of Victorian literature is very descriptive, but this is more modern in terms of pace and hopefully a modern audience will respond to it.”

But while you’d assume getting to grips with the archaic language might prove tricky, it was getting into the creative mindset of Hartright that proved Bournemouth-born Ben’s biggest test.

“Walter is an artist by trade and by passion, and the challenge for me was to get into his world,” he explains.

“(We) only had four weeks before we started filming so I did as many art lessons as I could, but I was never going to be Picasso in four weeks!” he quips, laughing.

“I am not a particularly talented artist,” he concedes. “I just (wanted) to capture an essence of how he saw the world, but I do sometimes think after the end of every project, within a month or so, you look back and it seems like a million years ago.”

Has he learned to play the drums for his turn as one of rock’s legends in Bohemian Rhapsody?

“Yeah I have, which was a great experience,” he reveals. “I couldn’t really cheat drumming as much as painting, so I had to really try and nail that one.”