Daniel Mays on playing John Worboys in Believe Me: 'I've played wrong'uns, but this terrified me'

At home in north London, Daniel Mays was experiencing some, shall we say, cognitive dissonance. We were talking about the actor’s latest gig, recording the part of Dobby in Audible’s all-star series of Harry Potter audiobooks. He admitted it was a challenging job, not least following in the footsteps (voicesteps?) of Toby Jones, who incarnated the squeaky, skittish house-elf in the film adaptations.

“I did all of the recording in one day — I think he’s in five of the books,” the 48-year-old told me as he relaxed in the living room of the home he shares with wife Lou and children, Mylo, 20, and Dixie, 13. “It’s described as a really high-pitched voice, so I could hardly talk by the end of the recording!”

Even under normal circumstances, it would be quite the pivot from the dramatic roles the perennially busy Mays — Bafta-nominated for his role as a corrupt, damaged copper in 2016’s third series of Line of Duty — usually inhabits. In the preceding months alone he had filmed and/or been seen in The Thursday Murder Club, Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, Bookish, Lynley, A Thousand Blows and Lord of the Flies.

But as we talked in late October last year, the Essex native was still processing his most recent pre-Dobby job: filming the role of “Black Cab Rapist” John Worboys in Believe Me, the four-part ITV series written by true-crime specialist Jeff Pope.

“I completely underestimated it,” he said heavily, memories fresh of the “really intense” and “isolating” nine-week shoot in Cardiff that he’d not long completed. “I was like, ‘Oh, you know, it’s just a part. I’ll be professional and get on with it…’ But to live with that character, to have it percolating in my brain for that length of time, was a lot to take on.”

Worboys was convicted at Croydon Crown Court in 2009 of the sexual assault of 12 women, and at the Old Bailey in 2019 of attacks on four further women. His victims were drugged into an amnesiac stupor by spiked glasses of champagne the seemingly amiable cabbie persistently pressed on them, spinning a yarn about winning £30,000 at the casino and needing to celebrate with someone. Given that his MO was to patrol the streets of central London by night, trawling for vulnerable women, most of Mays scenes on the Cardiff soundstage were shot after dark. “I kept travelling from London to Cardiff, filming one or two scenes a week, doing horrendous things to women, and then coming home again. That was my normal life,” he said with a wearied, mirthless chuckle.

Quite the schedule, and quite the emotional hangover. It did, he admitted, “affect me in a way that I didn’t think it would. Put it this way,” Mays added with a thin smile, “I was mightily relieved when they said ‘cut’ on the last scene! But I think it’s going to be a fantastic piece. A harrowing watch, but a vital one.”

Almost seven months on, Mays and I are meeting again. It’s Friday afternoon in one of his favourite Crouch End boozers and this week’s launch of Believe Me is two days away. And he wasn’t wrong: Believe Me is a compelling, urgent, enraging and, for sure, vital piece of television.

As he decompresses with an afternoon pint, it’s clear it’s been another period of pivot for a constantly in-demand actor. He returned a few days earlier from the Berlin shoot of Apple TV police procedural Berlin Noir, in which the Englishman reunites with Jack Lowden. Early in his career, the Slow Horses star had a bit part in Mrs Biggs, Pope’s 2012 drama in which Mays played Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs, with Sheridan Smith as his wife. “When Ronnie gets banged up in Wandsworth, she has an affair with a young kid, and he gets her pregnant. That was Jack Lowden. So when I walked into the room for the first script read-through, I said to Jack: ‘You knocked my wife up, you prick!’” The Scottish actor duly fell about laughing.

As you read this, Mays is already off again, in Dublin, shooting the second series of the reboot adaptation of Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley novels, which launched on BBC One earlier this year. But as we talk over draughts of Guinness, Mays is processing a few fleeting days back in London where he’s had to dive back into Worboys’ mindset for various radio, TV and podcast interviews.

He explains that he was helped in his preparation by police transcripts of the rapist’s interviews, “which was so revealing”. But in Believe Me, Pope foregrounds the stories of three victims, played by Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Aasiya Shah and Miriam Petche. The latter portrays Carrie Symonds, future wife of Boris Johnson, who, as a 19-year-old student, was picked up by Worboys on the King’s Road and spiked. She later waived her right to anonymity and campaigned against his early release from prison. It was these women’s testimonies that, for the actor, were the “eye-opener, and a great gateway into investing into what he was like on those journeys in the taxi.”