ACTOR Alex Ferns admits he wishes he'd never played Terrible Trevor, the EastEnders' wife-beater, as he takes up his biggest stage challenge so far as the all-dancing, all-singing Guys And Dolls musical lead, Nathan Detroit.

Having never danced before and hardly sung at all, the award-winning star is still a little surprised about being chosen for the West End role which will lead to a UK tour, taking in Sunderland's Empire for February 6-17.

He says: "The producers approached me to come and play Sky Masterson or Nathan Detroit and Patrick Swayze was leaving and, although I'd done three weeks in the musical Kiss Me Kate, playing one of the gangsters performing Brush Up Your Shakespeare, this was a whole different ball game. I felt, and I'm sure they felt, that vocally I couldn't do Sky because you need to be a really good singer and Nathan Detroit is more of an acting part."

Ferns was determined to take on the role because the singing and dancing ticked a lot of boxes for him career-wise. "There's been mention of the fact that they wanted to bring it back to the roots of what it was when Michael Grandage first directed it. I haven't seen a lot of musicals so I don't know what previous productions have been like. It's quite dark and I tend to think of it as a play with music in it. It is quite glitzy but not over the top, we're playing if for the reality of the piece," he says.

Having agreed to take on what he admits is his most challenging character to date, Ferns found himself with just two weeks' rehearsal and says: "I had to learn all the dance moves, particularly the Ballet of the Crap-shooters - which Patrick Swayze didn't do because his knees are gone and due to various other injuries - and I'm proud of myself but I'm knackered now because it's only the second week in the West End. Two weeks of going like the clappers trying to learn it all catches up with you.

"I couldn't afford to get nervous (on opening night). I just said to myself 'either you can do this in two weeks or you're out'. I was nervous but a good nervous not a bad nervous. It could easily have looked so odd because the other dancers are so in tune with each other that I could really screw it up by doing something completely different."

He jokes about doing his dancing at the back of the stage and never having heard of a step-ball-change tap move which he had to learn at BBC Strictly Ballroom Dance pace.

"There's a hell of a lot of dialogue to learn, a lot of dance moves and a couple of songs and also the harmonies in things like Sit Down You're Rocking The Boat, which is my favourite number. There were days when I was just shell-shocked," he admits and adds that he wouldn't have taken the role if he'd been expected to follow Swayze's version of Detroit.

"I saw the show and I thought 'I don't want to do it like that because it's just not me' but Mike Grandage reassured me that I had to find my own way and that's what I did," he explains.

Ferns found that appearances in stage comedies, Art and Coyote On A Fence, helped him, as did his early days in South Africa when he featured in an improvised cabaret based on TV's Whose Line Is It Anyway?

{BEFORE people knew me as the dreaded Trevor from EastEnders, what I did mostly was comedy. It's helped me be quick on my feet because not everything goes to plan on stage and there's been a couple of dodgy nights since I came into Guys And Dolls when I've been wondering 'oh God what comes next?'. A lot of time as an actor you have to pretend you know what you're doing," he says.

Having mentioned his EastEnders soap villain, who was killed off in a house fire, Ferns admits that it has become a cross to bear.

"The impact I had was insane, crazy. I like to think of myself as just an actor and not as a celebrity or anything like that. If I could have gone about it another way I would have, but circumstances being what they were you do something. If I'd known quite what it entailed in terms of how you get put into a box and the limitations it puts on you, I don't think I'd have taken it in the end. But that's all hindsight now," he says.

Ferns admits he was hurt when his ITV1 TV series, Making Waves, where he starred as Capt Martin Brooke, was halted mid-run two years ago. The Glaswegian went on to play the gangster hero of low-budget 2005 movie Man Dancin' which won an award in France and is still showing in US cinemas.

Currently, his own plans include two weeks of Guys and Dolls in Sunderland and three weeks in Milton Keynes, before possibly re-joining the West End version. A lot here may depend on how Miami Vice TV veteran Don Johnson copes in the role vacated by Ferns.

Last year he toured to Newcastle's Theatre Royal in the thriller, Strangers On A Train, and admits the biggest lesson he learned was to take his golf clubs with him to help fill the daylight hours before a show.

As for the story of small-time New York gambler Nathan Detroit, who bets that pal Sky can't persuade a Salvation Army beauty to go with him to Cuba, Ferns smiles ruefully about gaining a big interest in gambling himself.

"I've got the bug big-time because there's a couple of guys in the show who, when they're not acting, gamble for a living so we have a poker den down in the depths of the theatre. I'm hooked on it now," he smiles.