The truth is out! Tonight’s Corrie revealed that Curtis Delamere does not have a life-threatening heart condition, but instead has factitious disorder. We chatted to Sam Retford who explains Curtis’s life-altering condition, and what it could mean for his future with Emma.
This storyline has been brewing ever since Curtis first stepped onto the cobbles, and Sam told us he “knew from day one.” He said: “That was sort of what attracted me to the role so much.
“When else am I going to get this opportunity to play the long game? We had so many chats with production. It was just an amazing experience to be able to build a character for the last seven months, but always in the back of my mind knowing where it was going. That was huge.”
As we now know, a huge amount of who we think Curtis is has been based on lies, and Sam told us about how this affected his approach to the role. “When I first started the job, I looked at it in quite a clinical point of view.
“What someone with this condition would typically act like or how their behaviour is influenced by the disorder. You have to develop a huge amount of empathy for things that on face value seem like just black and white; good or bad; you would look at that on paper and think, that’s a bad thing to do.
“It made me really quite empathetic to Curtis and trying to delve into that and make sure that he was sort of honoured in all of those decisions he was making. [It came from a place of hurt and a place of self-loathing in a way.”
Many people around Curtis are sure to feel hurt and betrayed by his lies, but Sam said he "felt great empathy" for his character. “I would read some of that text and it wouldn’t even be an emotional piece of text, it would literally just be a small white lie that he would tell to Emma, maybe, and it would make me emotional reading it because he won’t need to lie. In his head, he really believed that he needed that to be loved by other people."
Sam went on to explain to us how Curtis has developed this condition. He said: “It comes from a place of neglect and forming ill-authentic relationships with people in his childhood. His pre-conceived notion of what it is to feel loved is built on really unstable foundations.
“It comes from a place of need to manipulate situations so that he gets that feeling. He’s just lonely. There was quite a lot that happened to him when he was younger and he sort of saw a light and found that it was easy to tap into people’s empathy towards him. He’s pretty lost.”
Curtis so far has been a very likeable character, and Sam hopes that viewers will feel sympathy for Curtis. “There’s the storytelling side of it that we want people to be able to watch this and get lost in the drama.
“But then there’s the other side of it where I kind of want to, even if it’s one person, try and teach someone that little bit of empathy and look a little deeper and think, it’s not necessarily a choice.
“[Curtis is] not sitting there in the morning going: ‘What lies am I going to tell today?’ It’s not malicious. It exists in this liminal space of unconscious need for care and need for that paternal and maternal lovingness that was absent when he was a child. I really hope people kind of see through the lies a little bit and see how human he is.”
Emma and Curtis's relationship has been solid recently, and Sam told us that Curtis’s feelings for Emma have always been genuine. “She taught him so much about himself but just a bit too late. He would do this before with other people, but he would leave.
“I think with Emma it was different because he found someone where it was worth it. I think he knew it was going to come up. He didn’t necessarily have the emotional intelligence to bring it up himself, but he knew it would come up and I think he was almost looking forward to that moment as well as fearing it.
“He was like: ‘This is going to be the only chance I get to be my authentic self,’ and I think [Emma] taught him who that was in him. It’s definitely an authentic adoration.”
Stay tuned to Corrie to find out how Curtis’s revelation plays out, and what this could mean for his future on the cobbles.
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