Showing posts with label asha alahan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label asha alahan. Show all posts

Saturday, 16 October 2021

Corrie Blog Interviews The Alahan Twins! Will Aadi and Asha Survive a Car Crash on 'Horror Nation Street'?



As we head into Corrie Super Soap Week, aka ‘Horror Nation Street’, we know that a lead character will end up dead! With a horror car crash lined up, are one of the Alahan twins at risk? Having already had one teenage death this year, will Coronation Street make it two? As part of our latest Corrie Blog press day interviews, I joined a Corrie Zoom session to chat with Adam Hussain (AH) who plays Aadi, and Tanisha Gorey (TG), who plays Asha, to learn more about this weeks car crash;   


What is the current dynamic between Asha and Aadi in the lead up to the car accident? 


AH The dynamic is currently very strained! There is this sibling rivalry between the twins. I feel like Aadi has a lot of resentment for his Father. There have been moments where Dev undermined Aadi, like when he expected Asha to get better grades than him, and he proved him wrong. Certain moments have built up a layer of resentment!





Does Asha feel like she is a favourite twin?


TG Well, not a case of them just being brother and sister. Twins have a special bond. The sibling rivalry is there, and that is perfectly normal. Aadi has supported Asha in the past, fighting for her and wanting to see her happy again. Personally (and because of what Asha has been through), she does feel favoured by Dev. She is a bit of a brat and fails to see it from Aadi's position! His feelings do not come into play!


How important is a family unit to the Alahan Twins? 


TG They are a family unit but with intricate problems as well. They are solid, Dev is a single Dad with businesses to run, and the twins never make it easy for him! Mary does try to help solve problems and bring them together. When Dev sees the bigger picture, he does see them as a solidified family unit. 


How does Aadi feel about it all? 


AH They are twins, whatever happens. Most of the time Aadi cares about his sister. He is annoyed about all of the attention she receives. Asha is a Daddy’s girl and Aadi's ignored. It gets under his skin! 


Does Aadi feel made to stand on his own two feet by Dev? 


AH Yes, Dev has been using him a lot to run the shop, the shop management, and he feels like he is owed something for all of the hard work. Aadi sees nothing returned by Dev, and that annoys him!



This week we see Dev have to make a split decision following a car crash. He rescues Asha leaving Aadi trapped in the wreck. How does Aadi feel when he realises his Dad’s actions? 


AH Aadi is sitting right next to Dev in the car and asks his Dad to help him, but at that moment, Dev says 'Rescue Yourself!' and I think it's a tipping point of resentment in a literal form. Although Asha is unconscious and helpless - it’s still a defining moment




With Asha unconscious, How do you feel Asha would think, knowing Dev rescued her over her Brother? 


TG I feel like it would depend on when she found out? Maybe if she finds out in the Hospital, she would. Dev is only one person though, and she was unconscious. Aadi is awake - he’s just stuck. That’s where the balance may have to be. Asha literally can’t help herself!


What was it like filming the night shoots and the stunts? 


TG It was cold and wet! There were so many people there on set, I do love to chat with everyone. I was dreading it, told my boyfriend how I was feeling, but then underestimated just how dramatic I was being! 4 am, cold and wet, but it was something I will remember! 




There is a massive explosion after the crash. What was that like to film? 


TG It was on a country road, so everyone had to sneak into the woods, so we couldn't be seen in the shot. It was so loud! I've never seen anything like that before! You don't know what to expect. The stunts were amazing to watch - the team did a brilliant job! It was loads of things I’d never seen before - even a drone camera. I felt like a celebrity! Loads of cool gadgets!


What was your favourite part, Adam? 


AH - Watching the lorry crash into the back of the car. The stunt was a good scene and so intense! The back of the car comes off - it was a great moment. Joining Corrie has been so much bigger than I imagined it would ever be - very educational & fun!





Do you think Dev’s decision will change the family dynamic? 


TG Yes. It’s just the three of them as this unit. I think this car crash could change the family dynamics!


                                               



Will Dev save one twin but lose another, or will this crash reunite the warring siblings? How can Dev carry on if he loses a child? I think Horror Nation St will have long-standing repercussions for certain Weatherfield residents,  but we've no idea who will survive!! Scary stuff!  


@rybazoxo Your Cobbles connoisseur! 







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Jimmi Harkishin interview: Dev's devastating decision in super soap week


Heartbreak comes in no small measures for Dev Alahan this Super Soap Week as he is forced to choose which of his children to rescue from his burning car. In this interview, Jimmi Harkishin tells us about the dynamic in the Alahan family, and what pushes his ultimate decision. 

In recent months, Aadi has been feeling left out as Dev focuses more on Asha, and this has created a tension within the family. Jimmi said: “Dev is aware that he doesn’t pour as much attention over Aadi, and he even says to Mary that he understands that his son gets overlooked sometimes.

“Dev is aware of the dynamic, but he doesn’t feel like it is that much of a problem because it’s not of Dev’s making; he has to take care of the kid that is in trouble, Asha. He doesn’t think that Aadi has any problems, just the normal, everyday kind of ones.” 

Despite Dev putting all of his attention into Asha, Jimmi says that Dev would give less attention to Asha if the roles were reversed. He said: “Dev doesn’t favour Asha more at all and as a parent myself, I know you would never allow yourself to think that. 

“He looks after, cares about and loves them both but it’s just that his daughter has been going through a difficult period, so he thinks that’s why Aadi feels left out, but he doesn’t think Aadi is right to feel that way and he doesn’t think there is anything he can do about it.”

Since Sunita’s death in 2013, family has become everything to Dev as he has had to parent Aadi and Asha by himself. Jimmi tells us: “It’s a lovely thing to play as an actor because if the twins had a mum, then a lot of their problems would go straight to her, or they would come to Dev through their mum. 

“Especially all the things that his daughter went through like the skin lightening and the sexting storyline, it was a difficult thing for a father to consider about his daughter and Dev found it really uncomfortable. 

“But it is really nice to see the problems the children have through the prisms of a single dad and how he deals with them. For ten years he has been there as their sole carer and obviously he has made mistakes along the way, but he has devoted his life to his son and daughter; he hasn’t met anyone else romantically, he hasn’t left them and he hasn’t compromised them in any way. 

“He has been both parents for the twins and he has been a good one. Mary was there for a while when they were younger which was really important, but it has all fallen on him now. He is always cooking, always cleaning… he always has that pinny on!”

During this major week of episodes, the Alahans are on their way to their holiday but get lost down a country lane. However, the prison van holding Harvey Gaskell suddenly smashes into the back of their car. 

When Dev wakes up, he realises there’s big trouble ahead and knows they must get out of the car, and quickly. However, he can only rescue one of his children, and decides it’s Asha. 

Jimmi said: “When [Dev] wakes up, he realises that they have been hit from behind. He’s choking and there’s smoke in the car. Aadi is trapped in the front of the car, but he is lucid and talking whereas Asha is unconscious. 

“It’s a knee-jerk reaction from Dev- who do you try to get to safety? His daughter isn’t talking, she is not responding, and I really do think that is the only thing that Dev could have done. It wasn’t a choice of favouritism; it was who needed his help more at that time. He had to pull her out and he was going to come straight back for his son but then the car explodes.” 

As Aadi is rushed to hospital, how will Dev cope with his decision? “He doesn’t feel guilty, but he is hurt and distraught because it is really painful to see anything happen to your children. Dev wishes it was him and wishes he could take his son’s place. It’s an honest pain that he feels.” 

Of course, a huge stunt like this requires a lot of hard work from all involved, and Jimmi said: “It was really good, but also really hard and very tough. The whole team from the director to the camera crew to the sound team were absolutely amazing. 

“Brett Fallis is a great director who had obviously thought about it all and the drones and the way the actual stunt took place was amazing. It was a full night of filming under rain bars, and they threw out thousands of gallons of litres of water which was really challenging. 

“When filming something like an explosion, it requires a different kind of acting, as it’s a response. You can’t prepare it like a monologue or a scene with someone, it just has to be in the moment, and you have to go for it and hope you make the right emotional choices. You can only blow the car up once, there are no second takes! It’s a really raw, basic approach to acting, it’s an emotional thing.”

Long-term Corrie fans will know this isn’t the first explosion Dev has been involved in. “When the corner shop exploded, with Maya, that was epic as well, but this is amazing. Looking back at the stunt with mad Maya, it was so long ago, I feel like a different person! I love all the character work that you have to do when you have a scene with any of the great actors on Coronation Street but doing stunts, you are on your own and you have to find your way through it.” 

As Dev struggles to see his son in danger, will Aadi pull through?

Sophie Williams

Find me on Twitter @sophie_writer1






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Monday, 4 October 2021

Iain MacLeod interview: Corrie producer teases death and destruction for super soap week


Super Soap Week is back! And it's planned to be bigger and better than ever before. 

Forget your trams and bulldozers, this week promises the return of the sinkhole, an explosive car crash, an escaped convict, and revenge plans that go awry, all while a huge storm puts the weather in Weatherfield. 

The week starts with Debbie organising her House of Horrors attraction, and as everybody excitedly gets ready, nobody notices the earth beginning to move around the Platt’s sinkhole. Meanwhile, Dev, Asha and Aadi leave for their family holiday, but find themselves lost on a country lane. Hurtling down the same country lane is a prison van, holding an injured and angry Harvey Gaskell. What does he have planned? 

Back on the street, Abi gets her hands on a gun and sets her sights on Corey, planning to make him pay for murdering Seb. Nina, however, is desperate to stop her, but will she be able to reach them in time? In the Rovers, Jenny begins a new relationship with Leo, but soon learns that Johnny plans to leave the street. As she goes to have a word with her ex, Jenny gets side-tracked, and soon finds herself being swallowed by the ground below her. Determined to rescue her, Johnny edges towards the sinkhole. 

Elsewhere, Leanne comes face to face with Harvey and Dev must make a heart-breaking decision about which of his children to drag from a burning car. 

If that isn’t enough to get your teeth into, we’ve got a series of interviews with the cast involved, but first we chatted with producer Iain MacLeod to find out what we can expect from this massive week of episodes. 

“I think what you can expect is something truly massive,” Iain told us. “I wrote down an outline of what I wanted this week to be, and in the back of my mind I thought, there’s no way we’ll be able to do all of this. I gave it to our incredibly talented production team, and they went: ‘Yeah, we can do that.’

“It’s got loads of twists, it’s got some stuff in there you’ll never see coming, which is always the best thing in a soap or any drama. The scripting of it is incredibly tight and pacey. It’s kind of Coronation Street in a microcosm. It’s got big drama, lots of heart, lots of humour.”

The week took about a month to film, including night shoots involving lots of water. Iain explained it was a challenging shoot for all involved, but it was well worth it. “I know our cast and crew worked incredibly hard. Having now seen the more or less finished episodes, I think it was worth all the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into it because the end result is incredibly dramatic and heart-stoppingly brilliant.”

Episodes like these undoubtedly require a lot of planning in advance, but Iain explained how this week has been in the pipeline for a long time. He said: “When we first collapsed the Platt’s back garden, it was with half an eye on doing something maybe around the 60th, and then we got to the 60th and the Covid restrictions in place meant we probably couldn’t do quite what we were intending to do with the sinkhole there.

“A number of times, people within the production have gone: ‘Shall we just fill that hole in?’ and I’ve always said: ‘No, leave it, because I’ve got a plan for that.’ We finally got to a stage now, thanks to the incredible graft and professionalism of our crew, that we were able to do finally what it was that we always wanted to do with that sinkhole.”

After a pretty dreary 18 months on Planet Earth, Coronation Street is about to give its viewers a real treat, and Iain is keen to show that Corrie has still got it. “None of us in Coronation Street takes our viewers for granted and I like to think we’ve given them an incredibly good selection of drama over the last 12 months, but one thing it probably hasn’t had as much of as it might normally have done is this big spectacle. 

"I think we’ve done all the intimate, human drama stuff fantastically well over the last 12 months, but these big, ambitious set pieces are a huge part of what we all do and something we’re very proud of. It was an opportunity for us to as well to sort of stretch our muscles again and go: ‘Look guys, we can still do this,’ and we really wanted to do it at the first opportunity. The moment we thought the Covid situation would allow us to do it, we wanted to give the audience something really spectacular.” 

In order to create these episodes, the cast and crew had to form close contact cohorts, which involved putting them in bubbles and increasing their testing. “I think we had 70+ specific bubbles around this big week, so it was far in excess of what we’ve done before, but there are certain things you can’t really do from two metres away. 

“The Covid measures were in large parts still in force, which did make it incredibly challenging and once again I can’t praise our cast, crew and our production team and our scheduling team enough for what they’ve done over the last 12 to 18 months. Doing anything in a pandemic is hard, making TV in a pandemic is particularly hard, and doing something of this level of technical ambition is unfathomable for the likes of me who just has to come up with the crazy ideas and I don’t have to execute them, so thank heavens we’ve got such a brilliant team because I honestly don’t know how they do it sometimes.”

On top of everything else, the Corrie team had to build posh new sets in a hired studio to accommodate a giant storm and collapsing sinkhole. “We essentially built this elaborate underground complex of tunnels and storm drains. There’s water involved which is always a nightmare. People say don’t work with children or animals, but I think you should probably be adding water to that list because it’s incredibly challenging. 

“We had to work out how to build this sub-terranean universe, fill it with water that would rise and fall so we needed water of variable depth, we needed it to be fast-flowing water at times to create the jeopardy that we wanted. I gave the design team a fairly impossible shopping list and much to my astonishment, they went away and did it all.

“We had to build a huge tank which would be filled with water, we had to pump water through it in high volumes to create a sensation of the risk of people being swept away. The sets themselves were built on winch-rigs so that they could be raised and lowered in the water to allow us to adjust the depth. We had to build the above ground and below ground thing, we needed to connect the surface world to this kind of sub-terranean world so the sets were 20 or 30 metres high so that we can actually drop actors from the surface world into the sun-terranean world for real. It was astonishing. 

“When I went in there for the first time to see the finished sets, it just felt like being on a movie set. It was incredibly exciting, and I think all of that hard work and all of that time and expenditure is visible on screen. The end result is incredibly cinematic and really impressive.”

At the moment, Coronation Street is keeping very tight-lipped about the finer details of super soap week, but Iain has given us some teasers to keep us on the edge of our seats. 


One major story this week will be Harvey Gaskell’s dramatic return to the street. “Will [Mellor] is a fantastically good actor," Iain said. “I don’t think many people have seen him in a role like this one before, but goodness me, has he inhabited the role of that really scary, incredibly plausible Salford gangster. He just felt completely box-office from the moment we saw him, therefore entirely appropriate for this kind of cinematic week. 

“The end result is fairly chilling, I think it’s fair to say, so I’m really looking forward to people’s reactions to that when they see what he’s got in mind. He feels incredibly real and therefore what we’re doing in this week feels incredibly scary.”


Abi and Corey have been at the forefront of Corrie for a while now as part of the hate crime storyline, and things only accelerate this week when Abi is determined for revenge. Iain said: “That story has been certainly among our biggest stories of the year, possibly the biggest. I think the actors involved are stellar and have been throughout. 

“When we designed this story, there was always a chapter in it where the people most affected by what Corey had done would have a huge opportunity to exact revenge and then a huge battle to have with their own conscience about the right way to proceed. 

“The scenes this week between Corey and Abi are emotional and incredibly tense and they look fantastic. I think they wouldn’t look out of place in a movie. It feels very cinematic and dramatic.”


The heart of this week comes from Johnny and Jenny, where they’re forced to admit their true feelings for each other. “What we get with Jenny and Johnny this week is circumstances force them to face up to their feelings for each other and their past and what they want from their future,” Iain explained. “It’s incredibly dramatic, but equally it’s very funny, it’s very heartfelt. The Jenny and Johnny stuff was the kind of heart and soul of the piece. What you feel like you always need as a Corrie fan is something that’s going to warm your cockles a touch and really give you that dose of old-fashioned Corrie humour, and that’s definitely coming from the Jenny/Johnny side of things.”


Finally, the Alahans play a big part this week as Dev makes the devastating decision of which of his kids to drag out of his burning car. Iain said: “I think the Alahans are a fantastic and very central family for us. Adam and Tanisha are absolutely brilliant actors, they bounce off each other fantastically well. 

“I love their performances individually and collectively. Putting them in the middle of this week was largely to do with that, but also to create this story going forward that I think is going to be really resonate for a lot of people across the country that have got siblings themselves.” 

What a week! As action-packed as this week is, it doesn’t stop there, as Iain assures us it’s simply a catalyst for future stories. “It’s all very well ‘blowing the street up’, but if at the end nothing’s changed, then it hasn’t really been worth doing at all. 

“There are brilliant final chapters in certain stories going on in this week, but it’s a launchpad for most of the big stuff that we’ll be doing into Christmas and well into the New Year.”

If this hasn’t got you shaking with anticipation, we’ll be publishing cast interviews over the next couple of weeks to find out more of what we can expect from this earth-shattering week on Coronation Street. Theories on a postcard please! 

Sophie Williams 

Find me on Twitter @sophie_writer1






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Friday, 4 June 2021

Coronation Street Episode Review; Thursday 3rd June 9 pm



A dark cloud has hung ominously over Weatherfield during this special week! Can we expect any more macabre machinations before these late-night episodes conclude? 

After Seb’s funeral on Tuesday, in which Abi overheard Corey's blusterous phone call, tonight’s episode begins with Abi being deterred from glassing the thug with a broken bottle! It may have only been by Asha’s self-serving rationale, but still, a close call. However, and as we all know, Abi is a tinderbox at the best of times. Before long, we see her meet a shady character down the back alley. What is she up to? 


Meanwhile, playing to Corey’s machismo, Asha coaxes the murderer back to their old flat for a few beers, a pizza, and a night of reconciliation. She soon gets a pizza delivered, and directly to the door...  Lax security at Victoria Court? 

Meanwhile, Nina is upset following the funeral and tells Roy she's off for a walk. Later, she spots Abi skulking around the back alley and assumes that Abi is back on the drugs, or looking to score some. Abi then admits she has scored some drugs, but only so that Asha can spike Corey and go through his phone!


Sarah and Carla have teamed up to steal back Underworld’s stock from Lucas’s bust factory. Narrowly avoiding being caught by a slack security guard, they are later questioned by a policeman - but only about the shot being fired! Meanwhile, their respective other halves meet up at The Bistro and Adam tells Peter that he doesn't want to take the transplant test any further.  Later, after finding out about Adam pulling out, Sarah and Carla confront some home truths. 

Upon admitting her truth to Johnny, Jenny tells Ronnie that he has to move out of The Rovers and right away - it looks like her marriage is over.  Later, and with Daisy’s delicious duplicity in the air, Johnny also leaves the pub and heads out to confront an expectant Ronnie. 
Elsewhere in tonight’s episode; Maria and Gary make amends after the near-miss shoot ‘em up. As one marriage ends, is this one going to be reconciled?  

Back at the flat, Corey shows some suspicion about Asha’s sudden warming to him but he’s soon comatose from the drugs, pizza, and booze overdose. Asha seems smug at the plan's success, accessing his phone by taking a photo of the slumbering killer. However, Corey stirs, wakes up, and angrily realises that something is amiss! 

A shooting, an affair exposed, and a factory robbery! Sharon's tasering seems lighthearted compared to some of this week's subterfuge! It's been quite the week for Corrie crimes, and it looks there's still much more to come before this week concludes!







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