'Everyone has been tempted, whatever stage of their life': ITV's Adultery stars Dominic Cooper and Romola Garai reveal why the controversial drama hits close to home

Adultery is poised to become everything viewers want from their Sunday night drama: compelling, tense, escapist, and full of that heady lust that disappears from real life relationships after the first rush dies down.

Let's face it, life can be boring and watching people play out our inner fantasies of having steamy liaisons on TV before we go back to loading the dishwasher, breaks things up a little bit.

For the uninitiated and those who've failed to notice the volume of adverts ITV has shown for it's provocative new show, Adultery airs on the channel from October 25.

In the show, Tom (Dominic Cooper) is married to Hannah (Shelley Conn.) When their 15-year-old daughter Jess starts dating her schoolmate Ollie, Tom and Hannah are introduced to Ollie's parents, Beth (Romola Garai) and Neil (Matthew McNulty.)

Everyone's lives are changed for ever, and a tonne of illicit stuff happens, when Tom and Beth start an affair. While the actors reveal that they sometimes felt "disgusting" and "awful" while filming the controversial series, it forced them to confront some uncomfortable truths about what it really means to be adulterous or know it's happening.

It's also going to push viewers into having similarly difficult, frank conversations with themselves - when you untangle the reasons Beth enters into the affair, they're actually very straightforward and will make you sympathetic towards her.

But should you be sympathetic towards somebody doing awful and destructive things? It's one of life's complicated questions and there will never be a right answer.

For Beth, she has nothing she can call an "excuse" for cheating. Her husband isn't abusive, she isn't particularly unhappy in her marriage, she just feels intense dissatisfaction.

"Her husband is a good guy but she’s had to suppress herself," Romola Tells The Guardian. She explains, "By the time Beth realises she’s given up too much for her marriage, it’s too late. When you have an extreme physical connection with someone else, growing in the fertile ground of marital disappointment, disaster ensues."

Married with two children herself, the actress says of Beth, "I just knew her. There are so many versions of that woman in my life."

She continues to say that so many things about Beth were a "hard-relate" to her own reality. "Somebody who’s exhausted from doing all the right things. Ferrying the kids around, washing the team’s football kit, contributing financially to the home in two different jobs. She’s part of the sandwich generation and she’s overwhelmed," she says.

"Resentment sits inside you like a little gremlin," she shares.

For Dominic Cooper, there were times during filming he felt sort of grubby. "Romola and I spoke at length about actually portraying these people – that was quite hard at the beginning to see whether anyone would feel for them actually," he says, pondering whether audiences would have any sympathy for either character.

He continues, "What they're doing, the betrayal and the level of that and doing as they please, it was frightening," saying that he often thought, "I'm disgusting, this is awful," during filming, wanting to tell his character Tom to just "pull yourself together, get back to your family."

On the other hand, he suggests that although filming the series challenged him, he believes adultery can be " something that we all question and everyone has been tempted – whatever stage of their life."

Weighing in on the possible audience reaction to this thought, he says, "I think watching it will be quite uncomfortable for many people if they're in a couple, it will raise a lot of questions with themselves and their own relationships, reflect on your own behaviour."

Another thing viewers won't fail to be confronted by while tuning in, is the differing attitudes to men and women when somebody cheats - its's almost guaranteed audiences will be more sympathetic towards Tom than they are to Beth, purely because of misogyny.

Romola says she felt trepidation at knowing the script was penned by a man. "I picked up a script about a cheating wife, written by a man, with a little bit of hesitation," she explains.

The actress adds, "In our cultural imagination, unfaithful women haven’t always been well served and can often be a projection of male insecurity – from Eve onwards."

Rightly, she says, "Women get called ‘whores’. There’s no slur word for sexual incontinence in men. You’d never call a dude a ‘home-wrecker’ either," as she reflects on the most difficult reason of all of them Beth might've had an affair: She just wanted to.

"It's still very provocative for a woman to say, 'I am going to put myself first,'" she says, adding, "I think it's still very rare for women to do that in the real world."

She concludes thoughtfully and with a lot of realism, "It's really rare to see it depicted on screen in a way that allows a woman the right to say 'I'm doing something purely for myself'. I think that is still very scary to do culturally in our society."

Adultery airs on ITV and ITVX from October 25.