The centrepiece of this year’s BBC1 Christmas schedule is Sarah Phelps’s bold new three-part adaptation of Great Expectations. Ray Winstone, who stars as Magwitch, and Gillian Anderson, who plays Miss Havisham, talk about playing two of Dickens’ iconic characters and why Great Expectations is a must-see for viewers of all ages.

“Christmas without a BBC show or drama is not really Christmas, is it?” says London-born actor Ray Winstone.

The 54-year-old follows in the footsteps of past luminaries such as Finlay Currie and James Mason in the role of Charles Dickens fearsome convict, Abel Magwitch, in Great Expectations.

“You have enough to drink and eat and then you sit down by the fire and watch a good drama, and there’s nothing better than Dickens at Christmas.” Ray is now set to strike fear into the hearts of a new generation of youngsters when he emerges from the shadows of a foggy Medway marshland to pounce on 11-year-old Pip, played by Oscar Kennedy. It is an encounter which will change both lives forever.

Ray said: “I remember the film came out with Sir John Mills and Sir Alec Guinness – it kind of stuck in my mind, especially the sequence at the beginning in the graveyard – it scared me. It was the kind of image that stuck with me all of my life really. It was the character in the film actually, the old boy who played him, the fear you have as a kid, someone coming out of the dark, the kind of thing you have nightmares about.

“As I got older, I began to realise what the film was all about, it is such great writing. The fact that it’s about where we come from, the inverted snobbery of people from other worlds, and what love is, and how love can be so cold. There’s a hell of a lot going on in it. Maybe as a kid you don’t understand, but you get it when you get older.”

Of course, Philip Pirrip, Pip, the orphan from the forge at the heart of Great Expectations, survives his terrifying ordeal at the hands of Magwitch. Yet he is set for heartbreak following his encounter with Miss Havisham, the reclusive owner of Satis House, which Dickens modeled on Restoration House in Rochester. Encouraged to believe he has a future beyond the forge and also with Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter Estella, his eyes are opened, and he falls in love, but this is all part of a master plan to destroy him.

“Miss Havisham draws him in and kind of opens his eyes and his heart, ultimately to crush it,” says Gillian Anderson who was fabulous as Lady Dedlock in BBC 1’s critically-acclaimed drama serial, Bleak House.

The star of The X-Files and The Crimson Petal And The White, explains why the role of Miss Havisham was one she could not resist.

“Miss Havisham is an iconic character that kind of pervades our world in various forms. I was kind of interested in what it was that was so appealing about her, why she seems to get under people’s skin, a woman who is deeply, almost psychotically manipulative and potentially really psychologically damaging to the two children that we see her have this direct impact on, and so there was a curiosity there for me.

“I don’t know how much of my falling in love with her was about falling in love with my interpretation of her or what I was getting off the page of the script or from the book. The bottom line is knowing that the BBC would do a spectacular production.”

Despite the time and effort that went into creating Miss Havisham’s make-up, Gillian isn’t complaining. The transformation from glamorous mother of three into one of Dickens’ most haunting characters was due to the skill of some of the best costume, hair and make-up teams in the country.

“It didn’t actually take that long to get into hair and make-up every day,” explains Gillian.

“There were two different wigs but three different stages of deterioration, and I think four-and-half stages of deterioration for the costumes. The last wig put a bald cap on because she’s lost so much hair that you actually see through to her scalp. So that took a little longer, but still under two hours.”