When Eastenders went to Ireland
Having shone in ‘Eastenders’, Jessie Wallace and Shane Richie have now got their own upmarket, lavishly produced spin-off, ‘Redwater’. They talk to Chris Harvey
Shane Richie and Jessie Wallace are sitting together at a table in Soho, swapping banter and finishing each other’s sentences for all the world like their married Eastenders characters Alfie Moon and Kat Slater – minus the yelling (and the leopard-print). The pair left the soap in May 2015, but are returning to BBC One this week in their own six-part spin-off series, Kat and Alfie: Redwater, set in an Irish harbour village, where Kat is searching for her long-lost son.
Unlike previous soap spin-offs, such as Corrie Goes to Kenya or the muchderided Eastenders three-parter set in Dublin 20 years ago, Redwater is an attempt at a stand-alone upmarket ensemble drama (director Jesper Nielsen is a veteran of Danish political drama Borgen). High production values, a strong Irish cast and a plot full of dark secrets suggest that it may have staying power. Nielsen has even gone so far as to compare the show – and the way in which one family’s love threatens to destroy it – to a Shakespearean drama.
“The actors are wonderful and the script is electric,” says Richie. One gets the feeling they both like the idea of being taken seriously, especially Richie, who, at a certain point in his career, was famous for a series of doorstepping washing powder adverts.
“I was given a s---load of money for that, but it shut my career down because casting directors would go, ‘We’ve got that prat who does the Daz ad’,” he says. “I know what people think of me, I know sometimes they don’t take what I do seriously. But I do.”
Richie, 53, it has to be said, has several strings to his bow. As well as winning over fans with his charismatic portrayal of Alfie on Eastenders, the actor hosted numerous game shows in the Nineties, earning him the soubriquet “Mr Saturday Night”, and won plaudits for his role in the stage adaptation of Grease.
Wallace, 45, meanwhile, gave a striking turn as Pat Phoenix in a BBC Four film, The Road to Coronation Street, the story of how the longestrunning drama series on UK television first made it on to our screens.
Nevertheless, Redwater is a recognition that Kat and Alfie have more pulling power than Richie and Wallace do as individual actors right now – “tapping into the brand” is how Richie puts it. He’s drinking latte; Wallace has tea. He looks groomed and selfassured in a leather jacket, Wallace is wearing a hippie-ish yellow dress. She’s wary, he’s chatty, but the closeness of their friendship is plain.
“We’re like brother and sister.” Wallace says. “Whenever I’m worried about something or I need advice, I always call Shane. We’re really close.”
They’ve been working together a lot recently. They were Robin Hood and Maid Marian in panto last Christmas, and toured in an adaptation of bestselling novelist Peter James’s The Perfect Murder last year, although Wallace admits that she struggled to believe in her character. She also reports that the two fell out when it dawned on Richie she had brought her passport with her to travel to Scotland.
“He called me an idiot, so I didn’t talk to him for a week,” she says.
It wasn’t the first time they had fallen out. The pair were victims of the phone-hacking scandal and didn’t talk for five years – from the time when they first left Eastenders in 2005 until their return in 2010 – each believing that the other had been leaking stories about them to the tabloids. Both ended up receiving out-of-court settlements from Mirror Group Newspapers.
“It’s really spiteful that happened between us, isn’t it?” says Wallace. Richie nods. “Yeah. I’m trying to think what happened in that five years.”
“You got married…” (Richie wed second wife Christie Goddard in 2007. The couple have had three children.) “Did you not come to my wedding?” “No…” He looks at her. “Why not?” “I weren’t invited!”
“Oh, that’ll be it then,” he says. She laughs. They interact like this all the time, as if from a script.
“When it happened, much as I loathed it, I understood why they did it,” confides Richie. “Everyone’s got a price.” Both actors have had a love/ hate relationship with the tabloids; at some points courting their attention, at other points looking for ways to escape it. Richie’s lowest moment came after he was unfaithful to his first wife, Coleen Nolan, in 1999 and the former Nolan Sisters singer-turned-loose Women presenter berated him in print for the hurt he’d caused.
Wallace, meanwhile, was the subject of lurid stories about a string of failed relationships, bust-ups with Eastenders cast members (including Barbara Windsor), her see-sawing weight, and wild behaviour that led to her being suspended from the soap for a time back in 2002.
It is perhaps no surprise then that she is cagey with the press, and refuses to comment when I ask if she can relate to the pressures that have led Danny Dyer, who plays the current landlord of the Queen Vic, to take a break from the show, reportedly for alcohol problems and difficult on-set behaviour (“I don’t really want to talk about that… it was in my past”).
Richie, however, sympathises with Dyer. Playing a role in the Queen Vic, he says, comes with added pressure. “You’re in everybody else’s storylines, so you’re in every day. We’d be in on Saturdays going, ‘What can I get you now?’ In defence of whoever is playing the Old Vic landlord, it’s a tough gig.”
When Richie first arrived in Albert Square, he’d already had a large taste of fame. But for Wallace, Kat was her first major role, at the age of 28. Having left school at 15 with no qualifications, she had run through a succession of jobs before being encouraged to apply for drama school by actor Iain Glen while doing theatrical hair and make-up for the Royal Shakespeare Company. She made her Eastenders debut in 2000 and instantly became one of the soap’s big draws, winning a string of awards.
Richie, meanwhile, transferred his popularity to the role of Alfie, and when the plot brought the two together, they became a soap couple to rank alongside some of the greats. “I think the cameras capture our relationship off-screen,” says Wallace. “This marriage has lasted longer than any of my real ones,” laughs Richie.
Both have solo stage parts coming up later in the year. Do they think their careers would have been different if they had been products of Rada? Richie levels a cool gaze on me. “No, I’ve met enough people from Rada that have served me in restaurants. I’ve worked with Rada actors that I’ve thought, how the f--- have you got a job? And I’ve worked with people that haven’t been to Rada that are brilliant, who have a natural talent.
“I don’t think the audience know a good actor from a bad actor,” he adds. “It’s about the words. If they’re good enough, audiences will believe them.”