Mays, 48, had to reenact Worboys' horrific attacks for the four-part ITV drama 'Believe Me', which explores the fight for justice after police failures allowed the 'black cab rapist' to operate undetected. According to Daily Mirror - 3am Showbiz, after shooting those scenes, Mays had to sit down with an on-set therapist to process what the serial sex offender did. Worboys was convicted in 2009 for sexual assaults on 12 women in the back of his cab, committing his crimes by lying to women about a big casino win or lottery luck and then giving them a spiked drink, rendering them unconscious. The drama focuses on how specific police failures enabled Worboys to continue his attacks, though the exact nature of those failures remains unclear from available reporting.
Mays shared the difficult scenes with actresses Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Aasiya Shah, and Miriam Petch, who play three of his victims named Sarah, Laila, and Carrie. All the cast worked with intimacy coach Sita Thomas to ensure they felt safe on set to shoot the harrowing moments in Worboys' cab. According to Daily Mirror - 3am Showbiz, it was the first time that Mays had worked with an intimacy coach on set. According to Daily Mirror - 3am Showbiz, Mays considered Sita Thomas's work as an intimacy coordinator to be invaluable.
We did have access to a counsellor. I ended up having a half hour conversation with her in the last week which was definitely needed. It was invaluable to me.
One notable victim portrayed in the drama is Carrie, who is now the wife of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. According to Daily Mirror - 3am Showbiz, Mays knew it would be challenging to portray one of Britain's worst serial rapists, but he had total faith in the script and project because the offer came from Jeff Pope. Mays previously worked with Jeff Pope on 'Mrs Biggs' and the Disney+ series 'Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes', establishing a trusted creative partnership.
The drama's production raises questions about how many total victims are portrayed and whether all are based on real cases, though reporting confirms at least three specific victim portrayals. The exact release date for 'Believe Me' on ITV has not been announced, and there is no information available about responses from real-life victims or their families to the production. Legal and ethical concerns about dramatizing such sensitive and recent criminal cases have not been addressed in current reporting, leaving those considerations unexplored as the drama approaches its eventual broadcast.
It was actually my first experience of working with an intimacy co-ordinator. It was all about trust. We had to get to a point where it was trusting between me and the actresses and they were offered a safe space to really risk and go for it as well. It was a balancing act of getting it as graphic as you needed it to be, without shying away from that, whilst keeping it in the boundaries of safety at all times.
The work of the intimacy co-ordinator was absolutely fantastic. What I should say, also, in that final week the taxi scenes were filmed... The great thing about those scenes is that you do feel in those moments that they are enclosed in that cab, there's this claustrophobia and it turns nasty. Like any great drama you've got to feel like you're a kind of fly-on-the-wall and you certainly do that within those taxi rides.
Jeff text me and said, 'I'm offering you a role and I need to give you a heads up before it goes to your agent first.' That was the first port of call because of the nature of what he was going to be offering me. I didn't have any reservations. I've had two wonderful experiences working with Jeff in the past; Mrs Biggs and Suspect wh