Deceased chicks, headless bodies and obsessive cleaning, it’s all in a day’s work for actor Rupert Penry-Jones on the set of crime drama Whitechapel, as Kate Whiting discovers

THERE comes a time in every actor's life, when he finds himself having to entice a fox with a pocketful of chick heads.

Well, OK, only if you're on the set of ITV's crime thriller Whitechapel and you're called Rupert Penry-Jones.

"That was pretty grim and it did make me feel a bit sick," the well-spoken Spooks star admits. "The fox kept running away, so in order to get it in shot, the crew were chopping the heads and legs off dead chicks, which I had to keep in my pocket.

"But the chicks were already dead," he adds, carefully. "No animals were harmed in the making of this show..."

After two very successful series investigating copycat crimes that echoed those of Jack The Ripper and the Kray twins, Detective Inspector Joseph Chandler (Penry-Jones), and his sidekicks DS Ray Miles (Phil Davies) and Edward Buchan (Steve Pemberton) are back to tackle more.

But this time, Chandler has installed "Ripperologist" Buchan in the basement under the incident room, where he's given free rein over a vast archive of crime reports.

"Now we're using the past as a map, but all the crimes we use were real and some of them are pretty nasty," says Penry-Jones, 41, mentioning that in one scene, a fox runs round London's East End with a human arm in its mouth.

The first episode of the new series starts with a massacre at a tailor's shop, with eerie echoes of the infamous Ratcliffe Highway murders, and in another storyline, a headless torso is washed up at Putney Bridge, leading Buchan to dig up the unsolved Thames Torso mysteries of 1888, where the remains of a woman were found at three different sites in central London.

With its new format of three two-parters, Whitechapel has upped the fear factor and plays out more like a horror than your typical crime series. The walls of the show's art department are even plastered with images from the film Se7en, according to Penry-Jones.

"The torso story is pretty gory. We had prosthetic bodies made and torsos with legs, arms and heads chopped off. You see it all – it's pretty hardcore."

Luckily for the dashingly handsome actor, there's a "very bubbly feeling" on the Whitechapel set, so he doesn't end up having nightmares.

"There's lots of banter, so it's a really fun way to earn a living. Doing some plays can be relentlessly depressing.

"I did a play once where my child got killed at the end of it – doing that night after night eight times a week starts to bring you down.

"But I live in a fluffy make-believe world most of the time," he adds, laughing.

"The news is the most depressing thing to watch on television really, so I think you need dramas like Whitechapel to lighten the load."

With cop shows and legal dramas almost two a penny on TV at the moment (Penry-Jones himself is set to don a wig again as barrister Clive Reader in BBC One's Silk), the actor says Whitechapel stands out for not taking itself too seriously.

"One of the things I'm finding slightly tiring with the cop genre is the tense, angst-ridden, serious cops.

"I'm a bit bored of that. I like stuff that's fresh, like Sherlock, because a lot of things that go on with the characters is very tongue in cheek.

"Another thing I love about Whitechapel is its heightened sense of reality. Yes, it's in London, but it's a magical little world."

So he's not worried the Olympics organisers will be angry with him for making the East End out to be an evil crime hotspot?

He laughs: "I don't think they'd mind, no. If you're going to visit London, Whitechapel is one of the best places to go for a taste of what the city might have been like hundreds of years ago. It's a fantastically atmospheric place."

To return to that other London detective, Penry-Jones believes Sherlock and DI Chandler have quite a bit in common, particularly their inability to form intimate relationships.

For Chandler, this comes down to his obsessive compulsive disorder: "He's a very particular type of man and it's easier to suffer being alone than to have somebody come into his life and try to compromise."

But there are a few love interests this series.

"In each story, there's a new woman he's trying to form some sort of relationship with, but he's very new to the whole thing and it doesn't really work. There are moments where he wants to kiss a woman and can't because he doesn't know how to."

Penry-Jones's personal life couldn't be further removed – he's been happily married to actress Dervla Kirwan since 2007, and the pair have two children, Florence, seven, and Peter, five.

"In some ways, it's easier to play roles that are opposite to how you really are," he confides. "The closer to yourself the character is, the harder it can be."

And travelling to far-flung places like Puerto Rico, where he filmed the recent Sky mini-series Treasure Island, is good fun too. His children came along and had "the best time of their lives" – and it was the first role they've been able to see their dad play.

"I wouldn't let them watch Whitechapel," he laughs.

Having children has shaped the actor's career, he admits.

"The passion projects, unless there's a very good reason to do it, have to take a back seat really. My passion project now is to be at home with the kids, when I'm not earning money to pay their school fees," he says, laughing again.

So there's no swanning off to Hollywood on the horizon?

"I'm very happy here," he says, smiling. "All my friends who have gone to LA have left the work here for me.

"I'm just going to stay and mop up after them!"

Whitechapel starts on ITV1 tonight at 9pm.