Iain de Caestecker is grateful to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; of course he is. It gave him six years to work on his role as Leo Fitz, an awkward scientist who shared his love of monkeys. It was the kind of superhero series beloved by fans who greet you enthusiastically in unexpected places: Italy most recently.

A couple of years ago, however, the 34-year-old Glaswegian knew he needed to change up his career. “We shot that for nine months a year,” he says on the phone from his current set in Bristol. “Not that I didn’t love it and love everyone involved, but I felt by the end it was time to be done. I had been in a warm country for five years and it didn’t feel like home to me.”

You couldn’t get ostensibly much further from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. than The Control Room, a three-part suspense drama by Nick Leather. De Caestecker plays decent, loyal Gabe, who works in the eponymous control room of the Strathclyde Ambulance Service. Somehow, he is swept up by a storm of unfortunate circumstances and poor, if well-meant, decisions into hiding one crime and becoming embroiled in another.

The story begins when he takes an emergency call from a woman who says she has accidentally killed a man. As he talks her down, she recognises his voice. Then he recognises hers. She is his best friend from childhood, a girl called Sam (Joanna Vanderham) to whom he was entirely devoted. They were drawn to each other as children because they had both lost someone close. Now she is persuading him to help her get rid of a body. Which, it is no spoiler to say, he does. The distinction between being a lad living an ordered, completely legal life and a criminal turns out to be a knife edge.

Actually, De Caestecker does see similarities between Gabe and Leo. “They both have quite enviable moral compasses I think and are quite brave in their own ways. You take away all the sci-fi superhero stuff and then it’s kind of the same. That’s what I always liked about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. That within that world of superheroes and aliens, it was kind of a relationship drama. This [has] carried that on, but it’s much more rooted in reality. You can see Gabe is an everyday hero, dealing with matters of life and death, but really he lives quite a quiet life by choice.”

Gabe’s mother died when he was 10, as we learn in flashbacks. “At that age, not only is it the loss of something of such magnitude in your life, but also what happens, I think, is you can become a bit of a pariah. Death is such a taboo – and was even more so 20 years ago – that people don’t know how to talk about it. His father can’t talk about it. Nobody at school talks about it.” That was something – as he puts it, being Scottish and male – he could recognise. “And then Sam comes along, who has had a similar experience. That’s a powerful thing, a bond that has bound them forever.″⁣

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Perhaps it is his want of social ease that means that when Gabe is forced to engage with events, his common sense goes haywire. “But it’s also a love story, I think,” De Caestecker continues. “It asks the question: how far would you go for someone you love? And I guess most people would hope that in those moments, while you can have that debate on the rashness of the decisions he makes, I think we would all like to think we would make that leap for someone we love. I think that’s a pretty romantic, special thing to do for someone else. A heroic thing.″⁣