Former soap star Billy Murray reveals pain of being latest big screen vampire

The former star of The Bill and EastEnders plays a 500-year-old blood-sucking villain in his new film Dead Cert. And the only reason he's appearing as a modern version of Dracula in Dead Cert is because the film is made by Black And Blue Films, who he is a partner in. The actor - best known as dodgy DS Don Beech in The Bill and crime boss Johnny Allen in EastEnders - said: "I am not a horror movie fan, they scare me. That were made by a dentist - but were more of a mouthful than Billy ever imagined. To complete the look, Billy had a set of piercing red contact lenses made - but he has very sensitive eyes. Billy was talking to the Sunday Mail just after Dead Cert had a rave reception at the FrightFest horror film festival in London. But when they started working on the script of Dead Cert, in which Dracula and his vampire cohorts muscle into a gangster's patch, Billy put the brakes on the notion of him being anything other than a producer. It is TV roles for which he has most famous but Billy has been in some memorable movies. His long-running stint on The Bill - which has just been controversially axed by ITV - meant that Billy appeared in an iconic small-screen role as Don Beech. Before David Jason got the part of the Peckham wheeler-dealer, Billy - dad of Hustle star Jaime Murray, right - had been in the frame to be Del Boy. Billy, who went on to star opposite Jason in A Touch Of Frost, said: "I didn't know anything about it until a year later when they told me that they'd come to see me six times in a West End play.