Coronation Street star Calum Lill struggled with confidence and ‘beat himself up’ over Joel performances

The truth is finally out about Joel Deering’s (Calum Lill) murder in Coronation Street, which means saying a final farewell to the sinister villain.

Joel terrorised Weatherfield locals for months, and had made countless enemies prior to his demise, but it was Lauren Bolton (Cait Fitton) who delivered the fatal blow that brought an end to his reign of terror.

While Joel will be remembered as a sinister villain, his nastiness wasn’t apparent right away.

It was a while after his first appearance before Joel’s true colours were revealed, with storyliners having come up with a dodgy backstory for the character in order to prevent raising suspicion.

‘One of the plans was: “He can’t be perfect, so let’s put in some sort of bad background and then hopefully that’ll be a red herring”, actor Calum Lill revealed.

Being involved in such an enormous storyline proved to be hard work for Calum, who explained that he struggled to watch his performances as evil Joel.

‘I hadn’t worked for two years before this and I really struggled to find my feet as I started,’ he revealed.

‘For about six months, watching the episodes back I was beating myself up. I’d watch the episodes with my fiancée and I’d go upstairs and she’d know to leave me for a bit because I was beating myself up. It took that time to try and get into the character.

‘I worked so hard. I know that there’s definitely better actors than me but I don’t think anybody else could have put in as much work as I did. Because I just said, if I can give this 100% and I leave and I don’t work for years, at least I know that there’s no more I could have done.

‘For that, it was up at 5.30am, I’d come into work and would be in work for about 15 hours. I’d get home for about 10.30pm at night, I’d eat some food quickly and then I’d do another two hours of learning lines and then do it again for about three or four months when I was busy.

‘Looking back, I’m finished and I can sleep now and I have time and I can see my friends. But that’s probably the happiest time I had, it was amazing. I am proud of my work, not necessarily because I think I’m great but because I’ve not had that opportunity to work that hard before.’

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