Corrie villain back on stage to ask: what makes a truly successful relationship?

Joe’s six-month stint in the series has earned him a nomination for Best Villain at the 2025 Inside Soap Awards. But now he is back, in a way, where it all began. Joe was an early graduate of Frantic Assembly’s talent development programme Ignition and has continued to work with the company as Iago in Othello, Chief Clerk in Metamorphosis and Frankie in The Unreturning.

“16 years ago I did their project which was called Ignition, an amazing course where they go out to ten different partner venues around the country and run free tasters and trials for young people to give them an opportunity to get a taste of what Frantic do. And then they select around 24 individuals and pay for them to travel to London where they create a piece of theatre in a week. I did that in 2009 when I was 17 years old and it was just incredible.

“The first thing I loved about it was that when I did it, it was only for young men, and for me it was amazing to be in a room of 20 young men but in a male-dominated environment that was open to vulnerability and to sensitivity and that was so productive and creative in a way that you can't be on a rugby field! It really opened doors for me and it confirmed for me at that age that this is what I wanted to do. I had seen two of their shows before and they were pieces of theatre which I saw as a teenager that dragged me to the edge of my seat and that I just sat and watched open-mouthed.

“Ten years later I did a show of theirs called The Unreturning with a cast which was comprised of Ignition graduates and that was the first professional show that I did with Frantic.”

Now he's back for his fourth show with them: “And the process was really unique. We had three weeks of research and development and they were spread over eight months before we started rehearsals. We were in the room for the conception of the piece and we started with no script. The first few days of research and development were like a big group therapy session. The question that we started with was what defines a successful relationship. The fairy tale is that you meet someone and you get married and you have kids and you have a long and happy life and then you die but what really interested us was the shorter relationships that might not last as long but which really affect you in a profound way and which leave their stitches in you as you go into other relationships.”

Written by Anna Jordan (Succession, Killing Eve, Yen, The Unreturning, We Anchor in Hope) and directed by Frantic Assembly’s artistic director Scott Graham (Metamorphosis, Othello), Lost Atoms tells the story of a relationship: an extraordinary, transformative love… or at least, that’s how it feels in hindsight. Was it truly special? Or just typical? Or perhaps toxic and doomed from the start? One thing’s for sure: it changed their lives…

In the piece, two people plunge deep into their shared pasts and propel themselves into multiple imagined futures. Lost Atoms explores how memory impacts the way we look at love and asks: what makes a truly successful relationship?

For Joe it is quite some contrast to Coronation Street: “I was in it for six months. They offered me a finite time as this character who kills a policeman and goes to jail and then breaks out of jail and tries to kill someone else. He's gone back to jail now!”

And that’s it for now as far as Joe knows: “But I would love to go back to Corrie. I loved it. I loved the speed that you are working at. It was incredible. You would shoot 20 pages in a day as standard. It's like going to a gym for an actor. At first it is overwhelming but the machine is well oiled and then you hit your straps and it was just great.”