“Not to the sci-fi, post-apocalyptic fantasy world – that never interests me – but it was the fact that people were living underground in a claustrophobic environment, due to something they themselves had created. What lured Ferguson into Silo’s grey, steampunk gloom? “I was drawn to the world,” she says. The idea of living in an authoritarian closed bunker is a familiar sci-fi trope: the most familiar reference point is probably Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), but Silo has more in common with George Lucas’ debut THX1138 (1976) and the enduring cult favourite Logan’s Run (1971). Silo is based on a series of fantasies – nine so far, with one-word titles like Wool, Shift and Dust – by American writer Hugh Howey. Anyone who breaks the rules is cast out to the wasteland, watched by the rest of the population through the cafeteria windows, their last instruction being to clean the window before they die. All knowledge of pre-silo times, including mementos, is banned. Nobody has been outside the silo for 140 years the outside world is supposedly poisoned. It is maintained by a giant generator rumbling in the lower depths and controlled by an unseen deep state, hidden in the labyrinths of the privileged higher floors. The silo of the title is a sealed tower hundreds of floors high, home to the last 10,000 humans in existence. So how does she feel about Silo? In this new series for television, Ferguson plays the sheriff in a dystopian future society and looks, if anything, tougher than ever. Rebecca Ferguson and David Oyelowo in Silo.

That’s what I like about Dune: everything is there for a reason.” ”I think we need to see women who are really great at fighting, in stories where the fighting is seen to be necessary to protect someone else. But for some reason those roles have come to me and I’ve done as well with it as I can.” Mission Impossible led on to Dune, the second part of which is due out soon. “When scripts come, I don’t look for the physicality and not take it if that’s not there. Rappelling from a Viennese rooftop with her legs wrapped around Tom Cruise’s hips: that’s how we think of Rebecca Ferguson. It was playing a spy of dubious loyalty in Mission Impossible, however, that made her not only a star, but one of the very few women known as action stars. I hope not to be that.” She has played a lot of different kinds of roles, she points out, starting with her year and a half in a Swedish soap opera while she was still at high school more recent prominent roles that weren’t at all kick-ass include her Jenny Lind, the opera singer, in The Greatest Showman and a medieval English power-player in the BBC series The White Queen. “Sometimes we get a bit niched,” says Swedish actor Rebecca Ferguson in her slightly lingua-divergent English, “and become the kick-ass woman or the sci-fi woman.

Dust silo series