God Complex

Whitehead also found the role difficult due to the unusual format: "For me, it really came down to taking it one day at a time, one scene at a time and going into detail about that scene you are shooting at that moment. Stefan sometimes becomes more aware, sometimes less aware, depending on what you chose. It is very confusing.

"It was really just playing it with the foundations of the character that I had already formed.”

"One of the frustrating aspects to shooting this was the slight differences that you had to include in order to accommodate the different choices," adds Poulter. "It became very difficult to remember between versions where those slight changes would take place.

"Particularly after a long day when you’ve shot it from a hundred angles."

This is not the first time somebody has tried to make a Choose Your Own Adventure-style film. There were several clunky CD-ROMs from the 1990s and modern games like Heavy Rain and Until Dawn work on a similar idea.

In fact, it would be easy to see Stefan as an avatar for the viewer – much in the same way many video game protagonists serve as blank slates onto whom the player can project themselves as they interact with the game world. But Whitehead fundamentally disagrees, describing Bandersnatch as a "very different beast" to a game.

"I’d argue the difference with this is that you are not experiencing the world through [Stefan], you are affecting him directly. As opposed to passively following him, what you are really doing is playing God.

"It’s a way of giving people this god complex."