Puwanarajah added: “All you can ever really do is try and work out what a person is doing in a scene, and you do that in the context of behaviour that you understand to be in play from previous scenes or from research, which probably sounds a bit science-y, and I am a scientist by trade, so that’s probably why.

“But for me it’s very important, and has always been important to me as an actor, to keep a clear sight of simple objectives in scene by scene order, rather than trying to work out objective things about a person.”

Despite not straying too deep into the morality of how Bashir obtained the interview, Puwanarajah, who also played the journalist in Naomi Watt’s 2013 film Diana, did say it would have been “interesting to know his thought processes around that time”.

He explained: “The question that you want answered as an actor is why is this person doing things? What are their aims? And those aims might be quite local to that person. I think I would approach it in quite a forensic way. I would just be interested to know what was the thought process from here to here. How did that work?”

In 2021, an inquiry by Lord Dyson found that Bashir had breached BBC rules by mocking up fake bank statements to obtain an interview with Princess Diana.

As a result of the inquiry, BBC’s director-general Tim Davie ruled in 2022 that the interview would never be broadcast by the corporation again.

Additional reporting by Abby Robinson.