It was confirmed that the teen was alive after disappearing from Weatherfield back in February

Joel Deering is set to get his hands back on Lauren Bolton as these Coronation Street first-look pictures show. It was confirmed during Monday night’s (July 8) edition of the ITV soap that the teen was alive after disappearing from Weatherfield back in February.

It was revealed in flashback scenes aired last month that Roy Cropper, as everyone already knew, was innocent after he was charged with the suspected murder of the missing teen and that it was really Joel who was her ‘secret boyfriend’ and had something to do with her sudden disappearance.

After making a swift exit from Roy’s homecoming, after he was finally released from prison, Joel was met by Hope Stape who handed him a necklace that she found in his car when cleaning it, which viewers recognised belonged to Lauren. Then, a flashback clip revealed him to be Lauren’s secret ‘boyfriend’ and him brutally attacking her with a chair leg.

But after months of pondering whether Lauren had survived after being in the solicitor’s clutches, the character appeared distraught as she came to Roy’s bedside after he collapsed in his beloved café and had to be given CPR.

Speaking about how Joel is feeling about seeing Lauren in the hospital, Calum Lill, who plays him, told us: “The immediate worry [for Joel] was that the police are going to find her and he’s going to get arrested and then the police don’t find her and she’s not in the flat so she must be alive but just waiting for her to go to the police – but she didn’t.

“So he’s gone from guilty and keeping his head down to back to that arrogance of, ‘I’ve gotten away with it! I’ve gotten away with something again because I’m so clever.’ I think seeing her, he hoped she was so scared that she’d never come back so he’s seen her and thought, ‘Oh no. My chickens have come home to roost.’ So once he’s seen her, he needs to sort it out… It’s like a sandcastle falling in front of him now.”

He added: “One thing about Joel, I’ve tried not to play evil or a villain, I’ve tried to play someone incredibly selfish and incredibly ambitious but who’s to know where the line is for him because so far, there hasn’t been one. It’s been self-interest above all.”

When it was suggested Lauren isn’t the first, Calum said: “No… I don’t know whether he’s necessarily flipped that much in terms of attacking but in terms of grooming and coercive control, then she’s definitely not the first. And probably not the last.”

Calum, who joined the soap last year and knew where his character’s storyline was going to go, also spoke about filming the flashback episodes where viewers will see the control Joel really had over Lauren before her disappearing act.

He said: “It was nice to finally know what had been going on behind the scenes. For actors, they’d usually say, ‘The script is the Bible and you go off that…’ I had one side of the character that was fake almost, pretending he was one thing, then I knew that off camera, all of this was going on with Lauren but I didn’t see it.

“It wasn’t scripted. The scripts didn’t come out until two weeks before filming it so I had to make up this whole world. So to finally get it was a relief but it was also like, ‘Ah, this is dark. I’m going to have to really go somewhere to find a dark place to film it’.”

He added: “It was great and as an actor, to get your teeth into something like that… If I’d got dropping someone off in a tai or getting to serve a coffee in the Bistro I would have been buzzing but to get to do something like that, it’s incredible.”

But Calum did have a bit of fear over seeing the scripts and finding out just how dark Joel could be for the first time. The soap star said: “Seeing it written down solidifies it I guess.