Bridgerton favourite Nicola Coughlan reveals experience of creating gritty porn addiction TV drama - including sensitively filming "intense" choking scene

Best known for her comedic brilliance in Derry Girls and Bridgerton, Nicola Coughlan is taking a darker role in C4’s I Am Helen, a raw, improvised drama about sexual consent, pornography and the invidious ways that a relationship can be wrecked by it.

When 39-year-old Coughlan first met Dominic Savage, the writer and director behind the acclaimed series, she had no idea they would end up making a film together. “People ask what drew me to the role, but there was no role: I was drawn to Dominic as a writer and director.

"I’d found some of the previous stories in the I Am… anthology incredibly affecting, and I think the best work you make is when you get on with people and have a shared ethos. I left thinking, ‘What a nice man’. I would also say that he’s a wizard.”

Famously, the I Am… series isn’t scripted, with Savage instead working alongside actors including Vicky McClure, Suranne Jones and Kate Winslet. “It’s a story, written in a narrative way,” Coughlan explains. “I felt scared, wondering how it was going to work. I’m lucky I’m not a nervous actor, but before that first day [of filming] I felt ill. I was absolutely terrified.

"With any role, there’s often prep work you can do that gives you a bit of armour. There was nothing I could do for this, because it’s improvised. Any prep would have gone against me.”

This process meant that themes emerged as the characters took shape. “When people found out it was about toxic masculinity, they questioned why we wanted to make something about the manosphere. Well, we didn’t. It just came about, I suppose.”

What actually came about is a sensitive, nuanced portrayal of a man’s pornography addiction, and how it bleeds into real life. Helen and Steve have been together for five years, but Steve is floundering in the wake of her purpose and ambition, one implication being that he turns to porn as a means of feeling in control. “There’s no hatred there,” says Coughlan. “But their relationship does develop into something scary, as is often the reality.”

It certainly does, with one sex scene depicting Steve’s attempt to choke Helen, a behaviour influenced by his porn addiction. If it’s a tough watch, it was even tougher to film. “It was very different from something like Bridgerton, which has intimacy rehearsals, so you know exactly what’s going to happen. On this, you couldn’t do that in the same way, but we certainly sat down with the intimacy coordinator and said what we were comfortable with. I knew the choking was going to happen, and I had a safe word. But it was very intense.”

It’s a testament to Joe Cole’s portrayal of Steve that despite his many flaws, his character isn’t entirely unsympathetic. “Joe did a great job. Steve is quite a laddish character, like a lot of guys who think of themselves as supporters of women but still have really regressive ideas. I don’t think that Joe plays Steve as overly unrelatable. Even progressive men can feel insecure about an ambitious woman, or a woman who earns her own money.

“Talking to people after [the screening], they’d say they felt for Steve, and I’d want to go, ‘No – he’s a bad guy!’ But their reaction is better, because we’ve become so polarised. In life, we often look for heroes and villains, but that’s not how the real world works. If we don’t meet in the middle on things, it’s a disaster for the world. I hope this does a good job of sitting in the awkward middle and inviting conversations.”

If I Am Helen is primarily about the misery wreaked by pornography, it carries an equally important message about female friendship. When it comes to extracting yourself from a dangerous relationship, it takes a village – and Helen’s village is female, with friends and work colleagues acting as shelter and shield.

“If you’re in a difficult relationship, it’s so important to have people you can be frank with who are not going to judge you, but are there to take care of you. Without her friends, Helen would be lost. I hope women will watch and see that it’s important to maintain your independence – financially too, if you can. I know that’s not a reality for everyone, but if possible, make sure you’re able to take care of yourself first.”

Coughlan recognises that many women aren’t able to leave toxic relationships as easily as Helen, due to the ties that bind them. “Financially she’s doing OK, she’s ambitious and she doesn’t have kids. This could be a very different story if they had a child together, and I hope it presents how difficult that choice is for a lot of women. It’s not as easy as someone going, ‘Well, you should just leave’, because it’s been proven time and time again in abusive relationships that when the woman tries to leave, that’s when it gets the most dangerous and violent.”

Whatever viewers take from it, at the very least it shines a light on a topic that’s hard to discuss, and whose ubiquity is even harder to fathom. “I was a teenager in the early 00s when smartphones started to come out,” Coughlan recalls. “You’d see people with things on their phones, but it was a tiny, grainy screen. It blew my mind that porn was a thing that people could access.

“And then in maybe 2003, I remember there being a story about a schoolgirl in Ireland. Someone had taken a naked picture of her, and it was going around. That was the first memory I have of anything like that. I remember being scared and shocked, and realising how it was going to change the world. You hear stories about people nowadays, not dancing in nightclubs because they don’t want to be filmed and put online. We’ve created a prison for ourselves in so many ways. It’s depressing.”

Above all, Coughlan hopes I Am Helen will lead to more open conversations. “We didn’t set out to make something that had a big message that was going to shout at people. We can’t live in this puritanical world going, ‘There should be no porn’. I don’t believe that. But I do think there’s a nuanced conversation to be had about the nature of some of the pornography people are watching, and how it’s causing damage to the people acting in it, or who are part of the industry – and what it normalises in people’s brains.”

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I Am Helen airs Monday 16 November at 9pm and Tuesday 17 November at 9.15pm on Channel 4. Catch up on C4 streaming.

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