Playing Nice's James McArdle talks playing vile Miles and surfing contests with James Norton

"You don't know what he knows and what he doesn't, so he's a really fun character to play. He's really manipulative, but charming, and that's something that really appealed to me about the character. There's all this play between the public and the private; I find that stuff so satisfying to play, so that was definitely one of the biggest things that drew me to doing it."

"Legacy is everything to him. As the series goes on, we learn where he came from; he is a self-made man, every part of his life is curated and he curates every part of his wife's life too. The swap was not according to plan for Miles, but he will not stop until he gets what he wants, and the son is part of that legacy for him. It's not a selfless love."

"Veep is one of my favourite TV shows, and there's definitely something political about Miles. I looked to a lot of politicians to play him — he has the smoothness of, say, a Barack Obama or a Tony Blair in terms of how he presents himself, but he has a dark heart. I looked at a lot of politicians to look at how to badly seem genuine, if you see what I mean. They work so hard to seem empathetic, and I find that quite amusing — I thought that was fun to play with."

"There's a version of this where he is the stock antagonist and villain, but I think for me the way into it was to play it that he loves this boy so much. It's not a superficial need, it's a genuine need to give this child what he never had. That's a really interesting push-and-pull: you've got this sort of Machiavellian sociopath in one regard, but he's obviously not because he feels for this child. That goes into the themes of the story that really attracted me, the 'nature vs nurture' theme that's at the heart of the story. There are already displays of Miles's characteristics in his three-year-old [biological] child, and he feels absolutely no connection with the child he's raising, so there's something that clicks for him like his instincts were right."

"I'm a big believer in levity! I was really interested to know who was going to be playing Lucy, because for Miles, you have to go to some quite dark places. I was really thrilled to learn that they'd cast Jessie, because we'd played brother and sister recently [in Life After Life], and now we're an abusive husband and wife! That's becoming a weird thing for me: I was brother and sister with Saoirse Ronan in Mary Queen of Scots and then husband and wife in Ammonite, so this is a bizarre theme that's coming around! But the real benefit is that you have trust there — I think it would be a very different experience if it was an actress that I didn't know and I didn't get on with so well. When you've got that levity and you're having a laugh, weirdly, I think you are safer to go darker. It has been a good laugh, all four of us — I hate to sound pat, but we do get on really well. To be honest, the filming just interrupted mine and James Norton's pathetic surfing competition!"

"Yes, our characters surf in it briefly, so they got us surfing lessons with this guy Pete from Kingsurf, who was so kind. We're very competitive — I was convinced that James had already surfed, because that part isn't in the book [by JP Delaney, which the series is adapted from], and I rang him up and I was like, 'why have you put this surfing thing in here? Do you just want to show the nation that you can surf?' But we started from scratch — I'm furious if he stays up longer than me, and I know he's furious if I stay up longer than him. Don't let him tell you otherwise!"