EAST London-born screen tough guy Ray Winstone doesn’t seem like the kind of actor who’d find anything scary. But he admits he had a few qualms about taking on his latest TV role, in the drama Compulsion, because of the sex scenes.

“There were moments when I thought ‘let someone else do this’,” he says.

“I suppose I had reservations about getting my kit off at 50. But, in a way, that’s what makes it really, because that’s what we are like. There’s very few of us who’ve got six packs and look all right. It could be the guy next door – and that’s the thing about it.

The monster could be anyone.”

Despite his fears about getting naked, the bedroom scenes aren’t that explicit. “I could say ‘yeah, there’s lots of titillation, watch it’ but it’s not like that at all. It’s kind of like violence when you don’t see it, but you know it’s there,” says Winstone.

“It becomes quite beautiful in a way, but the undertone of that is the horror of the manipulation, because it’s a manipulation of someone.”

Compulsion is a torrid one-off tale of desire and lust made by his own production company, Size 9, and is loosely based on the Jacobean tragedy, The Changeling.

Winstone plays Flowers, chauffeur for a wealthy Indian family, whose Cambridge graduate daughter Anjika (Parminder Nagra) is expected to marry the son of her father’s business associate.

When she despairs over the arranged marriage, Flowers steps forward and offers to make the problem “disappear” if she’ll sleep with him. It’s the start of a dark and obsessive sexual relationship.

Flowers is a very dangerous man, says Winstone. “There are some very dangerous men about, as we see in the news quite often. They manipulate their own, like the geezer in Austria. You know, the Fred Wests of this world. They take it a step further, but then so does he. He kills for her, for his love.

“He goes from lust to love, and then, as an audience you start to like him, hopefully, but then you think, ‘why do I like him? I shouldn’t be liking this guy’ and I like playing with that a little bit.”

Flowers is based on the servant De Flores from the 17th Century play, The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. But don’t expect him to give you a synopsis. “No, I didn’t read a Jacobean book, it would drive me insane.

I’d rather go and see a film,” he says.

Flowers and Anjika couldn’t be more different. She is educated, monied and Indian.

He is none of those things, plus he’s old enough to be her father. The actor found it hard to get his head round the age difference, not least because he has daughters of 27, 23 and seven.

“Women are much more developed in their head than guys, so when a man’s 25 and he going out with a girl of 17, it’s usually because he can’t find a girl of 25 he can dominate.

“My daughters have gone out with older guys and I’ve always looked at them and thought ‘you’re a nonce’. I think there’s some of that in Flowers, that domination thing.

“But what worries me is he’s watched her right from a little girl. That strangeness of watching someone who’s been a baby, a kid, and then to want them sexually, it puts him on a different planet.”

He’s full of praise for Bend It Like Beckham and ER star Nagra for taking on such a tough role. “We needed a young girl and an Indian girl and it’s very difficult from that culture to play those kind of parts. To me the film’s nothing without her performance.”

Next up for Winstone on the big screen next month is 44 Inch Chest, from the writers of Sexy Beast, about a man who has a nervous breakdown after his wife cheats on him. He’s also due to play Jack Regan in the much-talked about film version of the Seventies’ TV cop show, The Sweeney.

■ Compulsion: Monday, ITV1, 9pm.