Silent as the grave: Ramsay Street resident returns from the dead.
His wife is back from the dead, but Neighbours’ star Ryan Moloney isn’t saying what happens next. Kerry Harvey reports.
“He probably wouldn’t live in Ramsay Street any more because it’s probably one of the most dangerous and saddest places to live.” – Ryan Moloney
When Ramsay Street’s Toadie drove his new bride, Dee, off a cliff it seemed she was dead.
Thirteen years later, Dee (reprised by Madeleine West) is back and no one is more surprised than Ryan Moloney, the actor who plays Neighbours’ Jarrod Vincenzo Rebecchi, better known as Toadfish or Toadie. “When they floated the idea of Dee coming back it was kind of like, ‘Are you for real? How are you going to do this?’ ” Ryan says.
“They went, ‘Well, we’re going to do it’. I said, ‘This is going to be full-on isn’t it?’ and it has been. It hasn’t stopped.”
The first indication his first wife isn’t as dead as he thought comes when Toadie’s brother Stonie (Anthony Engelman) shows him a recent picture of Dee on his phone, which proves that she’s still alive.
“It could be an imposter, who knows what’s going to happen,” Ryan says, without revealing how the show’s writers bring his first wife back from the dead.
But he says Dee will find Toadie a much-changed man.
In the past 13 years, the Ramsay Street stalwart has been married twice more, lost weight, built his reputation as a lawyer, adopted a son Callum (Morgan Baker), and become a dad.
In slightly more unlucky moments, he has been shot, been caught up in
two different explosion dramas, ended up trapped in a fire and had a freak bouncy castle accident. Currently, wife Sonya (Eve Morey) has just discovered she is pregnant with another man’s baby, the result of a surrogacy arrangement since gone wrong. “It ain’t going to be good times for the family unit if (the woman in the photograph) turns out to be Dee,” Ryan says. “It’s his first wife and you could expect some of those old feelings would rear their ugly heads – which is not good when you’ve already got another wife.” However, while this complication for his character’s life took him by surprise, Ryan says after 22 years on Neighbours he has learned to expect the unexpected. “Anything can happen in soap world and anything does happen. A building can fall on top of me and I can get out unscathed, but yet a bouncy castle can make me a cripple. It’s just one of those things,” Ryan explains. Whether Dee’s return will be as dramatic as her departure – regularly voted one of the top-10 most memorable soap deaths – remains to be seen. She died when the car she was travelling in plunged over the cliff and into the sea after Toadie took his eyes off the road to share a kiss with his new bride. Toadie escaped, but Dee’s body was never recovered. “It did look pretty spectacular the car falling off the cliff, and her hair flying out the window, and then sinking into the water,” Ryan says, adding it was probably the greatest storyline he’d had the opportunity to film at that stage.”
What is even more surprising is that he was actually there to film it, given his character was initially meant to film only one scene and leave. The actor was just 15 when he was cast to play a troubled teen and both Ryan and the character have grown up on television.
“Both of us have significantly changed – as you would over 22 years,” says Ryan, who is married – to a Kiwi – and has two children who are avid All Blacks supporters.
“In real life, you can’t do the same things that you do in soap land. And they also don’t happen.
“Life is a whole lot more boring than in a soap – and thankfully so, I reckon.
“Toadie hasn’t necessarily learnt from all the things that he’s gone through. If he had, he probably wouldn’t live in Ramsay Street any more because it’s probably one of the most dangerous and saddest places to live.”
That said, the character has an international fan base and Ryan’s skills as an actor have been repeatedly acknowledged.
In 2010, he won the first Best Daytime Star award at the Inside Soap Awards and went on to win the award again in 2011 and 2012.
That’s not a bad result for someone who never set out to be an actor and has also managed to achieve his dream of becoming a commercial pilot without giving up his day job.
“I’m just thankful that they keep hiring me and they want me to keep doing it,” says Ryan.
“At the end of the day you’ve just got to realise this is an awesome job and if they want me to keep doing it then absolutely I’ll take it.”