ITVs Believe Me: Daniel Mays on the Toll of Playing the Black Cab Rapist and Writer Jeff Pope on Focusing on Victims Rather Than the Predator

The upcoming ITV drama BelieveMe features established and rising British stars coming together to tell a harrowing British story.Aimée-Ffion Edwards(Slow Horses, Peaky Blinders, Mr Burton),Aasiya Shah(Raised by Wolves, Bloods, The Beast Must Die) and Miriam Petche(Industry) feature in the four-episode series opposite Daniel Mays(Line of Duty, Des, A Thousand Blows, Moonflower Murders) as John Worboys, who is known in the U.K. by a more sinister moniker: the “Black Cab Rapist.”

He has drawn many a headline, so now it is time for women who suffered because of him to see their stories and their experiences told. From the indignity of multiple police interviews and intimate evidence gathering to skeptical lines of questioning from police officers, Believe Me takes audiences through many a painful, frustrating and anger-inducing experience.

Indeed, Believe Me, written and executive produced by Jeff Pope (Philomena, Stan & Ollie, Cilla), produced by his Etta Pictures, part ofITV Studios, and directed by actress (Happy Valley) and director (Showtrial) Julia Ford, tells the story of the victims of “one of the most prolific sex attackers in British history” and how they “were failed by the system,” a show description reads. “Worboys was convicted in 2009 for crimes, including sexual assault and drugging with intent, against 12 women between 2006 and 2008, with their cases selected from a large number of suspected further victims. His modus operandi was to pick up women in his cab after they’d been on a night out, claim that he’d had a win at a casino or in the lottery, then persistently offer them a drug-laced glass of champagne to help him ‘celebrate’ – which then rendered his victims unconscious.”

Believe Me focuses on the ordeals of two women (whose real names aren’t used, with the show instead using pseudonyms, with elements of their stories changed to protect their anonymity), portrayed by Edwards and Shah. They reported sexual assaults by Worboys, only to see London’s Metropolitan Police, aka Scotland Yard, failing to thoroughly investigate their cases, effectively leaving Worboys free to commit assaults undetected for years. Following his trial came the realization that he was linked to allegations of further sexual offenses against more than a hundred women.

Believe Me is expected to premiere onITV and ITVX in May, with a specific launch date yet to be unveiled. The drama was produced in association with, and is distributed by, ITV Studios. It was filmed in Cardiff with the support of the Welsh government via Creative Wales.

As a writer and/or producer, Pope has explored true-crime stories in such series as The Widower, about convicted murderer Malcolm Webster, and The Reckoning, about the sexual crimes of British media personality Jimmy Savile. But he prefers to explore the human fallout of crimes rather than glorify their perpetrators. “That’s really been my process for a long time now,” Pope shared during an online discussion about Believe Me with members of the press. “I’m not really interested in trying to get inside the mind of psychopaths.”

In fact, he shared that the creative team, including director Ford, knew quite quickly where the story’s focus would lie. “We really settled very early in the creative process on making this very much about the experience of the victims,” Pope explained. “These women were drugged and they could tell something had happened, but they didn’t know exactly what had happened.”

The creative team is showing us not the crimes themselves, but what led up to them and the emotional fallout. “We take the audience along the journey with [these women] on the day they report being assaulted, hours and hours and hours of interviews, intimate examinations, more interviews, samples are being taken, intimate swabs,” highlighted Pope. “These women just went through the most horrendous process of all, ultimately to be told we don’t believe a crime has happened. Essentially: ‘We don’t believe you’.” That is also where the title of the series comes from.

Mays had in the past already collaborated with Pope on Mrs Biggs and Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, so he was confident that Believe Me would be a strong show. “If Jeff’s going to come at you with a script, you know it’s going to be heartfelt, it’s going to be engaging, it’s going to be thoroughly researched,” the actor shared with the press. “He’s absolutely meticulous with his storytelling. He comes from a journalistic background, and so, in as much as it was a huge character to take on, with all the challenges that it threw at me, Jeff, as a writer, seems to get the best out of me as an actor.”

Mays kept highlighting the challenges of portraying a convicted criminal like Worboys, also describing the role as “a huge thing to take on” and an “acting challenge.”

The star shared: “You’re being asked to sort of humanize someone who is evil, essentially. It’s about delving beneath those headlines and trying to play him in as three-dimensional a way as possible.”

Pope said that he knew Mays would be able to pull off this challenge. But how about the emotional toll of slipping into the role of Worboys? “I underestimated how difficult that was going to be,” Mays told journalists. “I’ve got 26 years of experience as a professional actor, but I’m not going to lie to you. It did, at times, take its toll. It was a difficult thing and an unsettling thing to portray, and very isolating by its very nature.”

Director Ford was asked about her description of the show as a fair and balanced portrayal of what happened to Worboys’ victims. “It’s just that this felt like the best way to tell the story,” she explained.

“Undeniably, these women were treated very, very poorly by the police, … and we tell the story from their point of view,” she continued. “But I suppose what I meant by that was that we don’t point the finger at one individual, one police man or police woman. It’s not about one particular individual, it’s about the whole system.”