To celebrate the release of The Girl Before, based on the book of the same name by J.P. Delaney and airing this weekend on BBC One, we sat down with the show’s extraordinary cast to find out as many secrets as we could. We tried.

The Girl Before tells the story of Jane (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who gets the chance to move into a beautiful, ultra-minimalist house designed by an enigmatic architect (David Oyelowo). There’s just one catch: the occupants must abide by his list of exacting rules. Jane starts to feel the house changing her in unexpected ways, but when she makes the shocking discovery about her predecessor, Emma (Jessica Plummer), she’s forced to confront unnerving similarities. As the two women’s timelines interweave, Jane begins to question if her fate will be the same as the girl before…

A dark, mysterious series, both Oyelow and Mbatha-Raw tell us about the lure of the project and how it allowed them to play very different characters than they had before; how tragedy and loss change us as people; working together and why, in a spoiler-filled world, audiences are better to know as little as possible for this one.

Next, we spoke to Plummer and Ben Hardy about why they too saw much in their characters that they perhaps hadn’t played before, the relationship on-screen as the young couple at the centre of the story; how pain and grief affect the story, and why they were drawn to both the book and the series.

You can watch the full interviews below:

The Girl Before begins on BBC One on December 19th at 9pm.