Daniel Mays on ‘Believe Me’: ‘This show could save someone’s life’

“Congratulations. I want you to play one of Britain’s worst ever sex offenders,” is how Daniel Mays recounts the call from Jeff Pope, after the celebrated TV writer asked to ring him about a new project a while ago.

“I wasn’t sure who he was talking about at first, but when he said John Worboys I just thought, ‘Holy shit’,” says the Essex-born actor as we meet in central London in late April.

Mays, a reliable and familiar presence on our screens for the best part of two decades, will debut his most challenging and unsettling role in ITV’s Believe Me when it airs this weekend. In it, he chillingly portrays the London cab driver who drugged and sexually abused at least 16 women while giving them a lift home in the 2000s.

Worboys was jailed in 2009 and even came close to securing parole in 2018, just a year before he admitted four more attacks. It is now believed that the true figure of women attacked by Worboys could be close to 100.

“The idea of taking on the enormity of that role was a lot,” Mays reflects. “I had the same visceral reaction that my family experienced when I told them I was going to play him, but any reservations were certainly surpassed by telling the victims’ stories and I don’t think many people will know about the miscarriages of justice that went on.”

It is the kind of drama which is likely to make you boil with anger as it gradually reveals the extensive failures of the Metropolitan Police in listening to the women assaulted by Worboys, despite the similarities in their testimonies. Worboys would lurk the streets of Soho in his cab, picking up young women from nightclubs and telling them he’d had a significant win in the nearby casinos, before offering them a glass of champagne spiked with drugs to render them unconscious.

Mays is the first to admit he’s played a gallery of rogues throughout his career, but few come close to reaching the moral void of Worboys. “I’m not going to lie, I underestimated how challenging and isolating this role would be,” he admits.

“I wanted to make him as three-dimensional as possible, but it was a huge acting challenge because there was nothing in him that I could hang my hat on. There was no redeeming qualities to him in the script and that just terrified me. I just thought of my daughter who is thirteen now and going out on trains with her mates. I had this visceral reaction and I do think that helps to fuel the performance.”

The show employed an intimacy co-ordinator for the scenes which detail Worboys’ shocking crimes, while Mays was able to take advantage of an on-set counsellor.

“Some of the reports about that have said I needed counselling, but it wasn’t as big as that,” he reflects. “At the very beginning of this project, the facility of counselling was there for anyone who needed it, and I was thinking, ‘I’m not fucking needing that’. But by the last week, which is when we shot the taxi scenes, the counsellor was on set and just said to me, ‘Do you want to have a chat?’”

“And I did. It was just really invaluable to load it off really and just to chat about what we were doing because it was, it was a tricky thing to have in your head.”

In an eclectic career, Mays has honed a well-earned reputation as the kind of screen-stealer who is likely to leave an indelible mark long after the final scene has rolled. It’s why he received a BAFTA nod in 2016 for a one-episode turn as a bet copper in Line of Duty and won similar plaudits for his Olivier-nominated turn as Nathan Detroit in Guys & Dolls, a role he balanced while starring as a publican-cum-bareknuckle boxing promoter in Disney’s Victorian hit A Thousand Blows. Worboys may be a world away from these roles, but Pope told him that the charisma and charm innate in these past turns was, unexpectedly, exactly why he was the man needed to show exactly how the monster took advantage of his victims.

“The sense of charm and charisma was exactly how he preyed on those victims,” Mays says. “He was this sort of archetypal cheeky cockney cabbie, and that’s how a lot of people were disarmed by him. What makes him so terrifying is that as an audience, you just can’t figure him out. I think in his warped mind, as soon as they took that first drink, he felt like was entitled to do whatever he wanted with them. But you got a sense that, just like serial killers, once they’ve done it the first time and stepped over the Rubicon, he just couldn’t stop.”

Though Mays portrays the monster at the heart of this ordeal, Pope has previously stressed that the story needed to be told through the eyes of the victims – who are played by Miriam Petche, Aimee-Ffion Edwards and Aasiya Shah – to highlight their horrific ordeals. Could the show impact change in a way last seen by another ITV hit, Mr Bates vs the Post Office?

“That show was groundbreaking in the way it went all the way up to the government and all the good it did,” Mays posits. “And, well, the police don’t come out of this very well at all. I can’t think of a more aptly-named drama than Believe Me, because these women were not believed and the attacks were horrendous, but so too was what these women had to endure after that. The endless interviews, intimate examinations of their bodies. We’re dealing with trauma, and what the drama does brilliantly is show how that permeated every aspect of their lives over a very long time.”

There is also the hope, Mays explains, that it could have a wide impact on individual victims. “I honestly think this drama could actually save someone’s life,” he says. “There will be people who watch this who have encountered sexual abuse or even workplace abuse of some kind and they haven’t called that person out and they’re still holding onto it.

“I think this is a great example of how drama can spark change. When you call it out, when you find that inner determination and strength and dignity to fight the fire and have your day in the sun and call it out, then there’s the hope you can actually heal from it.”

Believe Me airs on ITV this Sunday (May 10).