The Lauren Bolton mystery has felt like a bit of a rollercoaster which might well have slowed down after the revelation that she is alive – but Coronation Street has thrown another game-changing twist into the mix.
Lauren, played by returning actress Cait Fitton, disappeared after a showdown with sexual predator Joel Deering (Calum Lill).
We saw him smash her over the head with a table leg after it emerged he had groomed her and needed to silence her to maintain his job and his relationship with Dee-Dee Bailey (Channique Sterling-Brown).
It was assumed she was dead, to the point that kindly café king Roy Cropper (David Neilson) was wrongly jailed for killing her.
But this week, after Roy suffered a heart attack, Lauren turned up at the hospital to apologise to him.
As she headed to make a swift exit, Joel grabbed her and pulled her into a side-room, leaving her frantic that he was going to attempt to finish her off.
Twisted Joel tried to play the nice guy act, attempting to gaslight her that he had only tried to protect her.
Flashbacks showed his unsettling methods of trapping her, stepping up as her lawyer and making promises before handing her money to get her out of her mess.
Lauren had been grateful for his kindness, not accustomed to someone stepping up for her after a life of rejection.
But it soon turned out that he wanted more from her and. as he moved in, Lauren felt coerced into entering a toxic sexual relationship with him.
It was clear that she didn’t want to sleep with him and things even became violent.
In real-time, Lauren bravely confronted Joel with his sick actions, telling him she was no longer afraid of him and branding him the monster that he is.
What transpired before Lauren went missing was her declaration that they were finished. But when she told him Dee-Dee deserved better, he turned and left her for dead.
In the present once more, he tried to get across his guilt but in reality, this was another lie – while he claimed he had feared for her and rushed to seek help, it was actually the case that he was doing everything he could for self-preservation, even preparing to get rid of the body before he returned and found she was gone.
Her disappearance left him in an outburst of panic and, now that Lauren is back, he fears the exposure of the truth.
Making a lunge for her, Lauren then dropped the bombshell that she is pregnant and the baby can only be his.
It knocked him for six, especially when Lauren made it clear she was keeping the baby, and wanted him to have no part in its life.
Joel wants her to get rid of the baby but she is having none of it, before then managing to escape him and flee the hospital.
He was in close pursuit in intense scenes, but she managed to get away in a taxi in the nick of time – but it won’t be the last she sees of him as he eventually tracks her down to an abandoned pub where she is sleeping rough.
The episode was a dramatic one, which actors Cait Fitton and Joel Deering threw everything into.
‘It was very tough,’ Cait told Metro.co.uk in an interview after we watched the episode. ‘Having a two-hander, there’s an immense amount of pressure there. Even regardless, doing a storyline that’s going to hit so many people, it’s hard!
‘You feel like you’ve got this duty of care to these people who have experienced it, you want it to be good and you want them to be able to look at it and go “wow, how inspiring, our story is out there”. All these issues need to be raised – these girls need justice for what they’ve experienced.’
Addressing her co-star, who she had barely had any scenes with before this huge episode, she enthused: ‘I think with Calum, he’s such a lovely person inside and out. He’s so vibrant, he’s so boisterous, he’s like a little kid at heart, so I guess that’s nice.
‘When you’re doing really intense scenes with someone you have to kind of snap out of it afterwards. Me and Cal hadn’t worked together prior to this episode – we had one scene together where we didn’t really have a lot of interaction – it was in the police station when Lauren got done for vandalising the salon.
There was always the thought, when you’ve not worked with someone before, of “are we going to work well together?”. When you get someone as talented as Cal who can just switch, it’s terrifying!
‘Everything that you will see is genuine fear, it’s not acting, it’s genuine fear. I think when you get someone who is so invested in the scripts and the prep, he puts so much work in and I think that’s just a privilege. I absolutely adore working with him.’
Calum added: ‘The attack scene was one day, and then we didn’t work with each other again, but every time we were in the green room and something came up in her script, or my script, we’d talk to each other about it to build this picture up of what was going on off camera.
‘So, we had this world built in our heads before we got to it, then once we got the flashbacks in script form, we’d kind of imagined that something like this had happened, so it all slotted into place.’
And with the latest twist now playing out, perhaps Cait can relax a little bit when it comes to hiding the truth from the viewing public and keeping those secrets.
‘It has been really difficult!’ she admitted to me. ‘I have been back filming since April so, I’ve had to keep a low profile, come in, sneak in, sneak back out again.
‘We’ve filmed on location as well, so that was quite bizarre how I had to dress up in disguise! I’ve known about coming back prior to leaving, so it was quite a fortunate position to be in because obviously, with this industry, you don’t really get that, once you finish a job, you don’t really know what’s going to happen from there whereas I knew, really early on, that I was coming back.
‘I had about six months of keeping quiet which was really tough, because everyone has been so invested in the storyline which is great for us, but it was really tough for me because when people were asking me if Lauren was coming back, I had to go along with it! I’m hoping it’s going to be a shock to the audience when it all comes out on screen.’
And there are more shocks to come…
