“The whole thing is the question,” says Elliott, “of what made that man who he became. Why is this man so terrifying? Why is this man such a loner?”

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That exploration meant that to Elliott fell the hardest task: Ben Kingsley’s bald, aquiline Don Logan, a foul-mouthed sociopath with a machine-gun patter all his own, won Kingsley a best supporting actor Oscar. It’s a monumental performance, a sustained turn as unusual and unforgettable as Joe Pesci in Goodfellas or Michael K. Williams in The Wire.

“When they asked if I would come in and read for Don Logan in Sexy Beast, immediately when you hear that name – this iconic, cinematic character – it sends chills up your spine,” says Elliott. “To have a crack at him was terrifying at first, especially as I was asked not only to come and read for him but to come in dressed like him.”

As he does in the original, Don sports short-sleeved white shirts and identikit-grey Farah work pants. It is impossible to watch Elliott without thinking of Kingsley.

“But because it’s such an iconic performance,” says Elliott, “I had to ask myself how I was going to pull it off. It certainly wasn’t going to be trying to mimic the performance – that’s an impossible job. What I wanted to do was to let that performance wash over me, respect and honour it, but then portray it in my own way.”

Elliott’s portrayal is grounded in a new backstory for Don, one that comes hand in hand with a new character, his older sister Cecilia, played by Friday Night Dinner’s Tamsin Greig.

“It’s too easy to say that Cecilia is a psychopath,” says Greig, speaking in London. Cecilia runs a penny arcade in the East End and is in every respect Don’s matriarch and overlord.

“I think that it’s a man’s world that she’s learnt to navigate. In this show it’s all male characters, all exerting power in their own way. Cecilia knows that she has power – but she has to operate in a different way.”

The way Cecilia operates – and hence the way Don operates – is in general by using brutal violence as and when required. There is torture, there are beatings, there is eating glass; at times it is very not nice.

“I found it really upsetting,” says Greig, “but I think if people want to receive something in a gratuitous spirit, that’s their choice. It’s your job as an actor to truly inhabit a character. We need to see where Cecilia is prepared to go in order to lay down her boundaries.”

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It all means that much of the success of the reboot of Sexy Beast depends on viewers’ ideas of the characters in the 2000 film. Will we care about Don and Gal in the series if we don’t know what they are going to become?

“People definitely don’t have to have seen the film to enjoy this,” says Elliott. “But I think it will be really interesting to compare the reaction of people who’ve seen the film to people who haven’t seen the film when this comes out. There are plenty of little Easter eggs in this show for people who have seen the film. Not just in terms of the script and what happens but in certain mannerisms that maybe we’ve pinched from their performances. But in the movie there’s no backstory. There are no real flashbacks. You just see these guys as they are in the twilight of their criminal careers. In this TV prequel we have a lot more freedom to surprise audiences.”

And when Don Logan says he’s got a surprise for you, lock the door.

Sexy Beast is on Paramount+

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