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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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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