Gray O'Brien will be best known to us Coronation Street fans as Tony Gordon.
But he's now appearing in the new ITV drama The Loch which will be on our screens this Sunday.. It's a six-part murder mystery, filmed at Loch Ness, Glencoe and Glasgow last summer, centres on a serial killer stalking a remote Highland town.
In a good, long interview with The Herald Scotland, Gray says this about his time on Coronation Street.
“Coronation Street was a game-changer for me. You know how big that character was. It was absolutely bonkers.”
But after he left Corrie when Tony Gordon was killed off in 2010, Grey found himself in resting actor limbo. “For the first six months I didn’t even think about work because I knew the phone wasn’t going to ring,” he recalls.
“Then the next six months it didn’t ring either and going into the second year it still wasn’t ringing. When it gets to five and six years you are thinking: ‘What is going on?’ People feel they can’t touch you because you are just too well known as that character.”
The Loch begins on STV, Sunday, at 9pm. Find out more about it here.
Read more Corrie news, interviews and spoilers here
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3 comments:
I still wish he hadn't been killed off....one of my favorite characters to this day.
This is actually pretty terrible. To have one role increase your visibility while not increasing your opportunities for so long. He was very talented and credible in his role.
I hope the same doesn't happen to the actors playing Phelan and Nathan.
Nathan is still young and pretty, so it may be easier, but while we are enjoying him, he hasn't really been around for long and the actor isn't a household name. For Phelan, I may not see him as a Hollywood leading man, but besides criminals, I think he could play anyone's concerned dad or intense co-worker. I think he's been visible long enough that even non viewers would have noticed him by now and, with the right manager, hopefully he'll get lots of work if he chooses to leave (which I hope he doesn't).
It's a shame Gray didn't have an aggressive agent like Kym Marsh's; he'd have been everywhere. Looking forward to this new series, he's so compelling.
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