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Nicholas Burns plays Captain Coutts

Who is Coutts?

Coutts is someone who actually existed. He's an army captain who's on board the Laconia. He's getting a lift back to Europe like lots of the passengers are and he gets caught up in it all. He helps as best he can – he was a real guy from Scotland but from quite a posh family. He went on to be a gentleman farmer in the Highlands afterwards and he only died about three or four years ago. He wrote a couple of autobiographies; I think he's a thoroughly nice bloke in the old-fashioned, British way.

He has a smashed-up nose throughout the drama – why is that?

I think that's part of the reason he's going back – he got half of his nose blown off basically. He was incredibly lucky not to be killed, in Tobruk, Egypt. In real life it was like a crater in his nose apparently. He had two or three attempts in the Forties at plastic surgery to correct it which were pretty useless. He looked dreadful, so I have a plaster on my nose pretty much for the whole of the story. I only take it off once to scare some children.

How has it been working with a multilingual cast on an international production?

It's been really great and we've all got on really well. I think it's great that nowadays we don't make films with Germans who have stupid German accents. You have to have German people. I remember thinking that with Passion Of The Christ in the original Aramaic. That was when I noticed this was starting to happen – if you want to create something that people believe in, that comes across as being truthful, to be honest, hearing English actors speak with German accents is a bit risible, so it's great that it's authentic.

Did you get wet while filming?

I had one day on the U-boat which was a big stunt SFX day, and I got quite wet then. It was the scene where the first US bombs drop when we're on the U-boat and they have these huge explosions in the water so we all got drenched. I seemed to get hit square on every time. But it was quite fun. It takes them so long to reset the explosives in the water that there's time to change. It feels good doing something like that – you feel like Bruce Willis.