Ben Miller seems to be appearing everywhere at the moment. He's recently finished his sketch show with Alexander Armstrong, and is now playing the role of the producer on Moving Wallpaper, as well as returning for the second season of Primeval as Ministry troubleshooter James Lester, trying to keep Nick Cutter and his team under control, now aided by the oleaginous Oliver Leek...Words: Paul Simpson

What did you think of the show when you were first approached?

I thought it was great. When I read the script, I thought, "This is fantastic. This dinosaur is brilliant, it's really fantastic..." then I thought, "Hang on, how are they going to do dinosaurs? Dinosaurs don't exist! Where are they going to get them from? It's obviously CGI – how good is the CGI going to be?" That was the question.

When we did the first series, all of us felt slightly intrepid about it. We'd be in the middle of a scene, fighting a Gorgonopsid, and turning to one other and saying, "If this thing looks rubbish, we are going to look like absolute idiots!" It was all about the creatures. But Framestore did such an amazing job. It looks feature film quality. The way they do the light is very cleverly done, and we shoot in the most amazing places – Battersea Power Station, Canary Wharf…And one of the things that I think Adrian Hodges does very well is handle the emotional stories of the characters. The higher concept stuff about time travel and dinosaurs is balanced pretty equally with the human drama. It's very real.

Do you find it difficult going from all the different characters on the Armstrong and Miller sketch show to the more serious character of Lester?

I really like doing both. I love doing dramatic acting and comic acting. It's great to be doing a bit of drama. It's very closely related, but there's something about a drama. In comedy, you can stand at a slight distance from the character that you're playing: you're playing both the character and yourself somehow. In a drama, you've got to get completely lost in that one character and if you see glimpses of the actor as well, it looks like bad acting.

In our sketch show, we both play women in the vegetarian restaurant. Part of the fun of it is we're clearly not women in a vegetarian restaurant. In this, the suit helps, the costume helps. It's why actors get so obsessive, I think, about props and costumes or anything that helps you believe in the character.

What's the relationship like between Lester and his new sidekick?

It's a very interesting dynamic. What I like about it is that Leek essentially is not all that he seems. The nature of that relationship does change. A lot of fun is had in the series. The thing that I love about their relationship at the beginning is that Lester is clearly irritated by him, and whatever I say as a put down, Leek just seems to take as some kind of compliment. It's the most frustrating thing, because I never seem to properly put him down. Lester despises everyone, and Leek is no different. It's been enormous fun. Karl [Theobald] is so funny.

Do you get jealous that you're the guy in the suit in the office while the other characters are off chasing dinosaurs?

I do get to fire a machine gun! For once, Lester raids the armoury, gets a submachine gun and pumps some creature full of lead: it's fantastic. In the last series, for the team, going to see Lester was pretty much like going to see the Headmaster, and sitting in his office with him saying, "We saw you cycling across the school yard!" But in this series I actually get out of the Headmaster's office, get down into the dining hall, and get to fight some creatures.

Lester gets a Rambo moment: he faces his moment of reckoning at the end of this series in the form of a future predator, which is rather poetic, don't you think? It's a case of kill or be killed.

There was a huge mammoth as well, that I am dealing with at the same time. I've got a machine gun, a mammoth and a future predator. As you can imagine, things get pretty hairy for Lester, as he is so far untested in the area of physical combat. Whether or not he makes it out alive and with his suit and tie intact is for the audience to find out.

Did you enjoy making that episode?

It was just great. Nick Murphy, who was the director of the last two episodes, myself and the crew spent the most amazing week shooting Lester's Rambo sequence – which is unheard of in TV.

We had hot-head cameras, huge cranes – I've not seen as much kit on the feature films that I've worked on. We had every possible imaginable toy, including an absolutely enormous crane, which was the size of the atrium in the ARC. It could shoot me from my office all the way downstairs, around anywhere – it was absolutely amazing! That was my absolute favourite bit. For a few days I imagined that I was Bruce Willis. It slightly went to my head and I did think that I was a kind of action hero. God it was fun!

Are you getting an action figure?

Originally I thought I wasn't going to get one, but I heard that I've got a reprieve and they are making a model of me. I was phoned personally by the producers to be told "a little bit of bad news." I was gutted that I wasn't going to have a model, but it turns out at the last moment that I am going to have one and I'm going to be twinned with the Future Predator. Every figure comes with their monster.

How did they make it?

You literally stand in the pose of the model. They have what looks like some kind of witchcraft drawn on the floor with lots of bisecting angles. You stand on this thing and rotate through 30' until you've gone full circle, and they take lots of photos. They do an equivalent of motion capture, but just still. But apparently all that those photos do is serve as reference for some bloke who gets a bit of plasticene and a penknife and whittles it down looking at the photos. It has a pretence of the technological about it!

Do you think children playing with them will kill your model?

I'll be the one left at the bottom of the sandpit, kicked around, hanging from the banisters. Although I was told by one of the distributors that my maquette came into the office at the same time as Kylie's and, by proxy, I've had sex with Kylie Minogue in maquette form!

Primeval is currently airing on Saturday nights on ITV1.