When I talk to Billie Piper on the phone, filming on Penny Dreadful has just resumed and she hasn’t been fully briefed on what she can and can’t say about the new second series of Sky Atlantic’s Gothic horror mash-up, so we tentatively manoeuvre our way around each of my questions until we arrive at something that both parties agree is acceptable.

Her character Brona, an Irish immigrant to Victorian London, shouldn’t be coming back at all – she died at the end of season one. But it wasn’t tuberculosis, as expected, that claimed her, she was smothered by one Dr Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), with the reluctant intention of turning her into a bride for his original dark creation.

Given that Billie has been asked to turn up for season two, a return from the dead seems the only route her character can take (unless she is being asked to play the particularly untaxing role of a corpse). Nevertheless, we’re both very aware of what she calls the “spoiler minefield”.

“I haven’t seen the last [episode of series one] but very few people have come to me and said ‘you’re dead and it’s over’, everyone seems to be looking at some kind of resurrection, so if I say that, I think that’s not totally putting my foot in it,” she ventures.

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And what about the other cliffhanger event we witnessed at the end of the series finale – Josh Hartnett’s unambiguous full-moon transformation? Wedefinitely know his character Ethan Chandler is a werewolf – he was last seen sporting excessive amounts of facial hair (even for an era when lamb chop side-whiskers were all the rage) while pulling apart a couple of Pinkerton detectives, not least due to his grief over Brona’s death. So assuming Frankenstein’s plans for Brona come to fruition, I fancy seeing her and Ethan reunited and tearing up Victorian London as a kind of supernatural power couple…

“I think that’s the kind of romantic notion, isn’t it,” says Billie carefully, “and I wouldn’t suggest you rid yourself of that because I think that many of those ideas are totally plausible, because that’s the appetite, that’s what you want, and I think those ideas can be fulfilled. But I can’t say that that is definitive…”

She giggles. “Aaaaarrrgh!” We’re both having fun trying to find a mine-free route through this field.

“The overall feeling is that all that kind of wild imagination and those ideas people have currently when they think about Penny Dreadful, those people will be satisfied one way or another.

“In [writer] John Logan’s head – which is a weird and wonderful place – why wouldn’t you have two corpses running around London shagging in bushes? Although he would put it more eloquently…”

He might. The Oscar-nominated, Golden Globe-winning creator of Penny Dreadful has serious writing pedigree – Logan also penned the screenplays for Gladiator, Hugo and James Bond’s latest outing Skyfall. So if his weird Gothic mongrel baby – which brings together characters from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – sounds on paper like a silly supernatural romp well, maybe it is, but it’s also much more than that.

“A big part of it is about mortality,” says Billie. “It’s a group of fearful people, really – they’re not sailing through life effortlessly they’re really disturbed and dysfunctional – and they’re all a bit punky, I think; they’re all rebels or people who are really disillusioned by life or are seeking something alternative – or just have an enormous interest in death.

“There’s also this huge religious thread to it as well – people burnt by religion and faith – and then there’s Frankenstein, who is science over anything spiritual. They’re asking these enormous questions. They’re all really profound in that sense. They’re all really smart – there’s not a thicko amongst them! – and I think that makes a really exciting drama.”

So – avoiding those pesky spoilers, of course – what can viewers expect from season two of Penny Dreadful? Can the series that in its first eight episodes brought us battles with vampires, the reanimation of the dead, demonic possession and wild sex (some of them at the same time) continue at that level?

“It’s definitely going to be more full-throttle than last year’s if that’s possible – but somehow it is possible,” says Billie. “And the stories, as ever, are just page turners. I just find them so compelling as a read. And then I think going into the second season – with everyone more confident and knowing what it is they’re making and having that marriage of minds – I think it will make for something really quite special.”

Penny Dreadful: Season One is out on Blu-ray and DVD on Monday 13th October and available to pre-order here