Coronation Street star Calum Lill admitted feeling a sense of ‘fear’ of filming violent Joel Deering and Lauren Bolton scenes as the truth about what really happened between them comes to light.

As viewers of the ITV soap know, it was Roy Cropper who was accused of being behind the disappearance – and presumed death – of Lauren. The teenager mysteriously went missing from Weatherfield on February 23 after being sacked by Roy from her job at Roy’s Rolls – and there had been no trace of her since – until now.

It was revealed in flashback scenes aired last month that Roy, as everyone already knew, was innocent after he was charged with the suspected murder of the missing teen and that it was really Joel who was her ‘secret boyfriend’, showering her with flowers and gifts.

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But it was also revealed he had something to do with her sudden disappearance. After making a swift exit from Roy’s homecoming, after he was finally released from prison, Joel was met by Hope Stape who handed him a necklace that she found in his car when cleaning it, which viewers recognised belonged to Lauren.

Then, a flashback clip revealed how Joel had brutally attached her with a chair leg. With fans left in the dark over whether Lauren was alive or dead, at the end of Monday night’s (July 8) Corrie, it was confirmed that she was in fact alive and was seen by Roy’s bedside after he suffered a heart attack following a confrontation with a gang of youths who tormented him over Lauren.

It’s now been revealed that Joel will confront Lauren in the hospital, with Corrie viewers set to be shown the whole story for the first time. Calum Lill, who joined the soap last year as Joel and knew where his character’s storyline was going to go, has now spoken about filming the flashback episodes where viewers will see the control Joel really had over Lauren before her disappearing act.

He told the Manchester Evening News and other press: “It was nice to finally know what had been going on behind the scenes. For actors, they’d usually say, ‘The script is the Bible and you go off that…’ I had one side of the character that was fake almost, pretending he was one thing, then I knew that off camera, all of this was going on with Lauren but I didn’t see it.

“It wasn’t scripted. The scripts didn’t come out until two weeks before filming it so I had to make up this whole world. So to finally get it was a relief but it was also like, ‘Ah, this is dark. I’m going to have to really go somewhere to find a dark place to film it’.” He added: “It was great and as an actor, to get your teeth into something like that… If I’d got dropping someone off in a tai or getting to serve a coffee in the Bistro I would have been buzzing but to get to do something like that, it’s incredible.”

But Calum did have a bit of fear over seeing the scripts and finding out just how dark Joel could be for the first time. The soap star said: “Seeing it written down solidifies it I guess. Then there’s that fear of, ‘I’ve got to do that!'”

Calum also discussed the lengths that he and Cait Fitton, who plays Lauren, went to in order to keep the storyline under wraps and also the work they put in together behind the scenes.

“We did the attack scene in December and the first time Cait and I had worked together, bar one line in my opening scene of the show, was kicking her head in. We’d never worked together before. So we had that brief scene but [this time] was the first time playing the bad side.”

He later shared: “In the run-up to this, most nights we were here until 9 or 10 o’clock. We’d go through every single line and have pages and pages of notes. We’d just stay here, we’d get extra dinner at lunch and then we’d eat it later and just stay until really late and go through each line, punctuation mark by punctuation mark.

“Mark Hudson who runs Manchester School of Acting, we just took every single scene to him and rehearsed. We went through it for hours and hours and usually, we’d have a cup of tea and a biscuit when we’d finished the day, drive home and then I’d drop her off because she couldn’t get public transport because she was supposed to be dead.”

Calum revealed how he’d have to drive Cait in and out of the building in his boot, adding: “She was sat in the front and we got to the gate and there was about 10 fans waiting there so I had to carry on and we got down the road and she jumped in the boot – slowly and carefully – came through the gate and had to let her out when we got in.

“We put so much work into it, and so many people put so much work into it not being leaked so we didn’t want to just be pictured at the gate.” He added of Cait: “She’s great. You have to be on your game because she can act you under the table!”