As far as Toyah is concerned, how is her relationship with Spider going? This week we see him surreptitiously having conversations with work about maybe taking on another undercover job, but as far as she's concerned at that point everything is good isn’t it?
Yeah, I think she thinks that everything's fine. Obviously there was a lot of drama a few months ago when Spider was undercover with the far right gang but since then things have quietened down for them. She’s been doing a few shifts in the bistro, she’s got a bit of a purpose again and she's very keen for them to get their own place and move the relationship forward. She absolutely sees a future for them.
She then finds these bank statements showing that Spider’s got more money than he said he had and discovers he's been in touch with his ex wife, how does that make her feel?
It just makes her feel really betrayed. She had probably the most traumatic year of her life last year with Imran and a lot of that was based on his deceit, he kept lying to her and hiding things from her, so I think she feels a bit like here we go again. She thought Spider was someone really reliable and honest, and thought that she was safe with him, so finding this evidence of his possible misdoings just throws everything up in the air. It makes her doubt everything that he's ever told her.
She confronts Spider, what sort of response does she get from him?
He tries to explain it away by saying that he was trying to get the divorce moving. So that should essentially be a positive thing that she’s happy about but then there’s the fact that he has more money in his bank account than she was expecting when he keeps saying that he's got to watch the finances. He says he's been saving up for something and he didn't want to do it this way but she's left him with no choice. He then gets down on one knee and proposes.
How does she react? Does his proposal come as a shock?
She’s definitely shocked, I think she thought they would probably get a place together and live together for a bit, so this feels like maybe jumping the gun a little bit, although she does love him very much. I think the issue is that because he has been hiding things from her, you could argue that if it’s all above board with his ex why has he not just told her that in the first place. So I think there are a few little niggles where she's thinking can I completely trust him and if I agree to this what is my life and my future going to be like, married to someone who is an undercover detective.
We see that undercover work come back to haunt them at the end of the week. Toyah isn’t aware that Spider thinks he’s been followed, so when a woman arrives at the flat and introduces herself as Spider’s ex wife, only for him to call her and say she’s an imposter, how does that make her feel?
She’s just completely bewildered, and a bit frightened because it's just incredibly irrational behaviour from this mystery person to pretend to be someone else so there’s red flags all over the place. Spider says to her just keep calm, I'm on my way back, don’t give the game away. So she’s just trying to act normal and use her people skills as a counsellor to keep calm in the moment. But we'll have to wait and see if this woman believes the facade that Toyah is putting on.
Do you think we're going to see a bit of drama in the following weeks?
Yeah, absolutely, this comes hot on the heels of me having quite a lot of drama last year, but that does tend to happen in soap. I’ve definitely filmed some scenes that were a bit unusual and there was some location filming which was really fun, so there's definitely a bit of drama to look out for.
Would you like to see Toyah and Spider together living happily ever after or do you think there's potentially things missing in the relationship, it did break down once before so is it destined not to work out for them?
I think it's difficult, the relationship has failed once before between Toyah and Spider. But I think they've always had a very deep connection and the fact that he was her first love definitely counts for an awful lot, there’s a lot of nostalgia there. I love working with Martin so I’d love them to move forward and explore that.
Are you enjoying playing out their relationship again, looking back into that history between the two characters and bringing that history into play again?
Yeah that’s the beauty of soaps, we have such a rich and long history of characters that you can reference things that happened 20 years ago and you don’t get the ability to do that in any other job, so I think that's a really special thing. I think the viewers also respond to that, I have people coming up to me saying I've grown up with you, when you were really young and first swooning over Spider and now you’re back together after all this time. People seem to like that history. On a personal level it's also a gorgeous having that time with Martin again, we hang out away from work and I’ve loved being able to reconnect with him as we always got on so well. So finding that friendship again is really special for me.
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1 comment:
I have to wonder if the upcoming kidnap story is more about redeeming Toyah and making her sympathetic to viewers again after she attempted to take little Alife away from Abi[She even told Saira she was Alfie's mother]?
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