Coronation Street star Ryan Prescott, who plays Ryan Connor in the soap, has shared some surprising behind-the-scenes details of how they filmed Ryan's horrifying acid attack ordeal.
Ryan was set to start a new life in Ibiza after he was offered a DJing job by club promoter Crystal, until devastation struck during tonight's episode of Coronation Street (Monday, March 27) as Ryan became the victim of a terrifying acid attack.
The catastrophic incident occurred as Ryan was helping Daisy Midgeley (Charlotte Jordan) prepare for her wedding. However, Daisy was terrified to find her stalker Justin (Andrew Still) lurking in the Rovers.
Holding a glass full of clear liquid, Justin lunged at Daisy and threw acid over her. But in a shocking turn of events, Ryan quickly stepped in between them and took the full force of the acid attack.
As Ryan screamed in agony while the acid burned his skin, a distraught Daisy called an ambulance and dragged him into the shower and turned on the cold water.
Actor Ryan revealed the backstage techniques the crew used to make it look as realistic as possible and what it was like to film the distressing scenes.
Thankfully, filming the scenes weren't as disturbing as they played out on-screen as Ryan joked that there was no acting involved throughout the shower scene due to the freezing cold temperature of the water.
He told What To Watch: "In the shower scenes itself, I completely underestimated the temperature of the water. It was so cold, there was no acting being done. It was just me trying to breathe throughout the five or six hours. It was so cold."
Ryan added that this was done because they weren't allowed to show steam, as he said: "We couldn't see any steam in the shots and it would have been as cold as the pipe would allow it as far as trying to numb the nerve endings and cool the acid.
"Water doesn't do that much in order to neutralise any acids or alkaline, but it is the thing that you have to do is go to your nearest water source and keep a constant stream of water and allow you to save some of the facial tissue. So we couldn't have any steam. It had to be as cold as it was, which I kind of underestimated a little bit."
Talking about how the acid attack was filmed with special cameras, he explained to us: "We were using Alexa cameras, which allow us to shoot 100 frames per minute, which allows us to kind of speed up the material and slow it down and layer audio over the top of it, which kind of gives this visceral guttural effect.
"It's kind of like when you graze your knee as a kid, and everything kind of goes blurry, it's kind of almost in hindsight or retrospect when looking over something that's so traumatic it kind of shifts in your mind and that we wanted to have that inclusive in how it looked."
The soap star also revealed how the different stages of prosthetics were made by award-winning special effects expert Davy Jones, who has worked on the likes of Pirates of the Caribbean and Narnia, and how he made a mould of Ryan's face.
He said: "We went to his workshop in the Wirral, an incredible guy. He's worked on all kinds of films like Blade 3, where the face opens and reveals all the teeth and stuff like that. So he's done crazy prosthetics.
"We went into his workshop to have a mould set and so we create a cast of my face, and then basically create pieces that would be layered in order to create the types of scarring.
"There are different stages of the scarring, and the wounds as well. So we've had to kind of focus on what stages come in and skin grafts and things like that. So there were a lot of things in play to kind of consider."
Coronation Street airs hour-long episodes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 8 pm on ITV — see our TV Guide for full listings. You can also catch up on episodes on ITVX.
