TV GAYNOR ON
GAYNOR Faye has been in two of our biggest soaps and some of our best loved dramas but fears she’s become “invisible”. Four months before she turns 50, the mum-of-two who is currently in primetime drama The Syndicate on BBC One has revealed her worries are about growing older.
So much so that she’s retraining as a counsellor – not to quit acting but in case the work dries up.
She said: “I find that you do become a bit invisible in your 40s. That’s unfortunate really and really sad, but that’s the nature of the industry. I don’t want to become invisible and so my attitude is, ‘OK that’s not happening for me right now, so what now?’”
Although she was one of the lucky ones and was able to work on lottery winning series The Syndicate between last year’s lockdowns, Gaynor also had plenty of downtime to think about her life and what she wanted to do, enrolling in college courses including Spanish, maths, creative wellbeing and a starter course in counselling.
She said: “My faith (she’s a Buddhist), my whole life, is about helping other people and I do believe that, coming out of this pandemic, there are going to be a lot of problems with people’s mental health and especially in teenagers and young people.”
Gaynor, the daughter of writer Kay Mellor, says she’s been acting “since I’ve come out of the womb”, and put on plays in the garden when she was young before doing theatre at school and making it her career.
Since she bagged her first TV job in 1991 BBC comedy The Sharp End, she’s become a household name as Judy Mallet in Coronation Street during the 90s and appeared in much-loved dramas like Playing the Field, Between the Sheets and Fat Friends.
Most recently she was Megan Macey in Emmerdale from 2012 to 2019, quitting when she got a job in the stage version of her mum’s TV hit Band of Gold.
She said: “I could have stayed in Emmerdale for a very long time, but I wanted to keep pushing myself.
“What drove me to quit was the fact that I was offered Band of Gold and I wanted to get my teeth into something new, and really test out my theatrical roots again. And I loved it.”
Fans are still hopeful she’ll return to
Emmerdale and Gaynor is quick to keep the door open. She said: “There’s definitely a possibility she could return. I think it’s one of those jobs which reels you back. Megan still exists at the moment and she may come back at some point. I literally went to go and do the stage play, and then I carried on and did The Syndicate.”
Given Emmerdale is filmed in her home city of Leeds, it was a good job – so much so that she thought she’d only been doing the soap for four years and discovered it had been seven.
Gaynor added: “It was a tough decision and it’s always nerve-wracking but I really enjoyed doing the play and I’ve loved doing The Syndicate and I wouldn’t have been able to do either if I’d stayed.”
The current series of The Syndicate is the fourth – each series following a different group of lottery winners. Gaynor plays newsagent owner Cheryl who is engaged to gambler Frank, played by Neil Morrissey. He is accused of swindling his syndicate out of a major lottery win.
Gaynor said: “We shot it between the English second and third lockdowns.
“There was lots of Covid testing and self-distancing and putting ourselves in bubbles, and everybody abided by it. We wore masks all the time and every time we had a Covid test, somebody was like
You do become invisible in your 40s. It’s sad GAYNOR FAYE ON AGEISM IN ACTING