Coronation Street boss Iain MacLeod has opened up about how the horrifying attack on Nina Lucas and Seb Franklin has been in the pipeline for almost two years.
Nina, played by Mollie Gallagher, first appeared on the ITV soap in 2019 after Roy Cropper was searching for his long-lost brother – who he found alongside his niece.
Sadly, his brother was dying from a terminal illness but had asked Roy to take Nina under his wing and viewers have since fallen in love with the pair and their touching uncle-niece relationship.
The soap’s executive producer has said that since Nina’s character was conceived, the storyline about her being attacked for how she looked has been in the works.
Opening up about how the storyline came about, Iain told the Mirror and other news outlets: “A couple of years ago a story of this type was floating around the writers’ room and it just felt it was something that needed to be told. It’s something that sits very well in the soap genre.
“We don’t set out to change the world but we can be quite an agenda-setting genre and the message around intolerance and inclusion and the need for that – more so now than ever was incredibly pressing. So as far back as even the introduction of Nina, so we knew that this was the direction that the story was going to take.
“So we began with the death of Roy’s mother, you might recall some years ago, and it led to the point where we brought Nina in specifically with the view to embed her in the show and have the audience really get to know her and really fall in love with her.
“[We wanted] the audience really understand her relationships with everybody on the street and with Roy, so we embedded her as deeply in the show as we possibly could with a view to doing this story with her at a point where we thought it would be really powerful – a character that you could really fall in love with over a number of years being in the middle of something so heartbreaking and tragic and visceral.
“It felt like it was a really impactful way of telling this story, which as I said, we thought was incredibly important. We all felt very acutely that this is a story that still needs telling.”
The soap boss also spoke about how the attack would deal a devastating impact on a number of Weatherfield’s residents.
“It will run and run and run, this story. It’s one of those things where a really shocking inciting incident triggers months and months of story repeating under cast at the centre of it,” he said. “And everything that I’ve seen is just knockout.
(Image: PA)
“It draws in a lot of different families and in the best tradition of Coronation Street storylining, it pits neighbour against neighbour and in some cases, husband against spouse and all of those interesting areas of conflict. It becomes partly about class as well, going forwards.
“I can’t say too much about that but in terms of how the criminal investigation unfolds, it becomes about class and background and privilege and there are interesting elements to it that we draw into the story as it unfolds.
“But yeah, at its core we wanted it to be a story about showing the horrific intolerance that can face people purely on the basis of how they look like, perhaps, or what music they might listen to or what subculture they identify with and that is the core of the storyline, right at the finish line. It’s a story about intolerance and the reaction to that.”
Originally from https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/corrie-attack-nina-seb-years-24051699