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Helen McCrory as Rachel Price

When preparing for her role as Messiah's new Chief Pathologist, Rachel Price, Helen McCrory drew a line at attending a real autopsy despite being offered the opportunity.

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"I walked into make-up one day for tests and opened a pathology book, literally took one look and shut it straight away. I just couldn't bear to look at it any more.

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"It wasn't so much that I am squeamish - although I am - it was more to do with the fact that these are people who are someone's daughter, mother, brother and that was the main difference between the character and myself," she says.

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"I would look at them as a series of bodies hacked to bits whereas Rachel can look at the bodies and see corpses as a series of clues to help solve the crime, so I didn't think it would be helpful to me at all to attend a lab," she adds.

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"I did, however, meet with a team of pathologists who advised me every step of the way and one in particular who was with me throughout the mortuary scenes which we all found enormously helpful.

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"Our director, Paul (Unwin), really went out of his way to listen to the advice of the pathologists and make the scenes exactly the way they should be in order to be authentic.

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"In one of the scenes where the actor, who is obviously alive, is lying naked on the slab with his prosthetic torso opened up I had to put my hands into a cavity filled with chopped liver and that wasn't very pleasant.

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"I couldn't look at it, at which point the director came over and whispered to me that I had to look as if I knew what I was talking about! I thought I could just get away with saying I felt something!" she laughs.

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Rachel is married to DS Jack Price (played by Hugo Speer), and a close friend of Red. Having recently lost her daughter through suicide Rachel has decided to deal with her grief by returning to work.

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"Pathologists are highly-trained doctors who tend to lean towards the more academic end of medicine," she explains.

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"They are very precise and very exact people because they spend a lot of time by themselves and tend to be loners.

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"Rachel has a certain detachment from life but when we meet her she has just lost her eldest daughter and you really see her in those first weeks trying to cope with the loss of not just her daughter physically but her husband emotionally."

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As Rachel is left to deal with her two remaining children, their grief and her own, Jack falls into a cycle of drinking and despair that he finds impossible to get out of.

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Rachel's decision to return to work is based on her ability to rely on her professionalism as a mechanism of coping with her pain.

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"I think everyone has that ability, in times of crisis, to be immediately drawn towards what you do best as a means of dealing with stress - whatever that might be - and in Rachel's case it is twofold: her work and her relationship with Red.

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"She has a huge sense of loyalty to Red and his empathy and frustration with not being able to move forward in the case drives her forward constantly to try and find clues on the victims' bodies to help him.

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"In the same way that Red empathises with the victims and puts himself in their shoes," she continues,"in a similar way, Rachel's pathology has now changed because she has been through grief and has started to understand that these are not just bodies - these are people with family and maybe that makes her a better pathologist.

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"It is her confidence and her own readiness to help Red that brings her back to work."

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Playing Rachel was a dichotomy for McCrory.

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"On the one hand there is a side of Rachel's life that is full of pain and self-loathing; whilst on the other, her professional life is becoming closer and closer to the murders that are occurring. As often happens in times of stress, you begin to see the world in a very different way - which is what happens to her.

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"Suddenly this woman who could work on body after body, dissecting and cutting up corpses, is for the first time so close to death herself that she is examining her whole relationship with her job.

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"She was a difficult character to play in that wherever she is, either at home or work, she is immersed in this unquenchable pain."

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Having never lost someone to suicide meant that McCrory couldn't draw on personal experience and had to find the pain within to play the role.

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"I read a few books that had been written about people who had been left behind by suicide and researched the role that way. It was difficult to comprehend. I avoided talking to people about it.

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"But you don't have to have a huge imagination to know what kind of grief comes with suicide: enormous self-loathing, hatred and that feeling of letting everyone down."

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Rachel's relationship with Jack is deeply affected by their daughter's suicide. It is a huge stress on the family which pulls their relationships apart.

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"While Jack is in anger, Rachel is in grief and she finds it a betrayal that he won't help her grieve because of his conviction that Isabel was murdered," she says.

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Despite knowing Ken Stott for more than ten years - they first met at the National Theatre - they have never worked together until now.

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"I have been a fan of Messiah from the first series and the production standards and writing are of such a high quality that it was impossible to turn down.

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"And I've known Ken for ages - since we worked together at the National ten years ago - and we've always wanted to work together, so it was the perfect opportunity. Plus I thought it was a really interesting role."