Sam Rockwell

FOSSE/VERDON Friday, 9pm, BBC2

1 My character is the dancer and director Bob Fosse, the genius behind Chicago, Sweet Charity and Cabaret, and the series charts his relationship with his wife Gwen Verdon, played by Michelle Williams. My mistake was to assume I could dance as well as Bob. His unique style – turned-in knees and jazz hands – required brutal hard work to master, but I did all the dance scenes myself.

2 Bob lost a lot of his hair, so every day I’d have my head shaved and strands of hair glued to my bare scalp, in whatever amount was appropriate to the stage in Bob’s life we’d be shooting. I had a horseshoe-shaped wig for the Cabaret period, with a tuft of hair at the front. We called it ‘the libido’!

3 I consulted my therapist for the role, as Bob was so complex. Playing such a troubled drug addict

messed with my head. He was also very skinny, and I lost a stone. That look was easy thanks to working 17-hour days for seven months!

4 You rarely see Bob without a cigarette in his mouth, and I got through thousands of them during filming.

The trickiest thing was doing a scene where he would be demonstrating a dance move and he still had a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.

5 Bob and Gwen’s daughter Nicole was an executive producer and she gave us old Polaroid photos of the couple’s apartment in New York so we could re-create it in a studio. We had cherubs painted on the wall, tapestries and orange crushedvelvet drapes. When Nicole walked on set she used a very rude word of exclamation, then said, ‘This is very close to exact.’