Coronation Street star exposes behind-the-scenes of Joel’s death – what fans didn’t see

Coronation Street star Calum Lill has spilled some “incredible” behind-the-scenes secrets about his character Joel Deering’s grisly final moments.

The ITV soap baddie was killed off onscreen on Friday night, while his death had been confirmed weeks earlier. We finally got all the details, as a series of flashbacks played out what happened the night Joel was killed.

As we saw where each suspect was and what happened in Joel’s final moments, we uncovered it was Lauren Bolton who dealt the fatal blow that killed him. Lauren, who had been groomed and later attacked by Joel earlier this year, took her revenge and whacked him over the head with a brick.

The attack killed him, but Lauren wasn’t alone as her partner Max Turner was on hand to cover her tracks. Max chucked Joel’s body over the bridge and into the river, wanting to make his death appear as a suicide.

But how did the show film Joel’s gruesome demise on top of that bridge? Calum who plays Joel told The Mirror all about what went on behind-the-scenes, from long hours filming to the amazing technology used to shoot that jaw-dropping moment where Joel lost his life.

He confirmed the shoot was “like a film”, with the use of a volume wall to capture the moment Joel fell from the railway bridge, and all the scenes that happened up there in Joel’s final moments. One scene alone took 12 hours to shoot, but it all paid off in the end.

All the scenes were in fact shot inside in a studio using the volume wall, before a camera captured footage of the location to give the impression the characters were on the bridge, a similar device used on the soap in 2022 when Kelly Neelan was forced to stand on a rooftop ledge.

Calum told us: “It was in Gorton, this massive huge black room. The ceiling was probably about 70 feet high. It’s just this massive semi-circle of screens and then you’re set in the middle, so we’ve got this long railway bridge that we’ve built and that’s on a table that turns.

“So instead of the camera moving, the camera stays where it is, the train track moves and the whole background is synced with the cameras. When the camera moves, the background moves as if the camera’s moving in the real place.

“They go out to the real bridge, take 360 views of the whole place and then wire the camera up so the background scenes change. It’s really hard [to explain], when you see it hopefully it will explain. It looks like the cameras are moving all around the bridge but the cameras never move. It’s crazy but really cool.”

Calum went on: “It was like we were filming a movie. One of the scenes, we spent 12 hours shooting. We had all these different cameras and green screens and special effects. I’ve never experienced anything like that before so it was incredible.”