Jodie Comer has revealed that "a lot of rehearsal" went into creating a single-take scene in her new Channel 4 drama Help.
The one-off piece from acclaimed screenwriter Jack Thorne follows Comer's character Sarah as she works in a Liverpool care home during the pandemic.
In one stunning scene in the middle of the drama, Sarah is left alone overnight in charge of the residents - one of whom is seriously ill with coronavirus - and she has to turn to one of them, young Alzheimer's sufferer Tony (Stephen Graham), to help her manage.
The highly-visceral scene runs to more than 26 minutes and was filmed in a single take at the request of director Marc Munden.
"It was such a clever decision by Marc, I thought," Comer said at a press event this week. "That sequence is so relentless - it's relentless for her, and what Marc wanted was the audience to feel that and experience the exact same thing.
"What was so beautiful in a way about doing it like that was the teamwork. These were long long long takes, so there was a lot of rehearsal to make sure everybody knew where they needed to be at each moment.
"Even the pace I'm walking, I've got to walk at a certain pace because the cameraman's holding the camera, and we were all kind of sync with each other. It was so incredible."
Munden added: "It was never written as a single shot, it was written as a sequence of Sarah trying to save Kenny's life, but from very early on in the rehearsals Jodie was so real and raw and natural in that part that I realised we could just look at her for 30 minutes and it would be the drama.
"That's basically what we did - for me it was about bringing the audience into the horror that a lot of care workers must have experienced in that position."
Help airs Thursday, September 16 at 9pm on Channel 4.
Neil Wilkes
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