EastEnders actor was trapped in jungle for 3 days with broken leg
He slipped from waterfall ‘while taking a selfie’
After slipping down a waterfall and spending three days trapped in a rock pool, this is the dramatic moment former eastenders star Paul Nicholls was finally rescued.
the actor, 38, who played Joe Wicks in the 1990s, struggled with the agony of a broken leg in the thai jungle until a passer-by spotted his abandoned motorcycle and raised the alarm.
Nicholls had hired the bike under his real name, Gerrard Paul Greenhalgh, when he reached Koh Samui, thailand’s second largest island.
He then travelled to the Khun Si falls – rarely visited by locals – where he fell and smashed his leg.
the Bolton-born star, who now plays a teacher in Channel 4’s Ackley Bridge, was unable to climb out of the water and spent days with no food in the jungle with snakes, mosquitoes, spiders and leeches.
He was only saved after a villager spotted his motorcycle on a track leading to the falls and called the police.
A search party with dogs spent hours hacking through the undergrowth, eventually finding Nicholls semi-conscious and suffering from hypothermia.
footage shows him crying out in pain as rescuers apply bandages to his leg and lift him on to a stretcher before carrying him over the harsh terrain.
It took more than two hours for Nicholls to reach the International Koh Samui Hospital but when doctors demanded £13,000 a night to treat him, he was forced to transfer to another site.
Doctors described the actor as seriously ill after contracting an unspecified bug.
Yesterday his agent said he was ‘recovering well’ but declined to comment when asked if the actor had travel insurance.
It is not clear how Nicholls fell but some locals feared he may have slipped while taking a selfie.
Speaking to the Sun, Nicholls said: ‘I am lucky to be alive. I had a phone with me but I fell from such a height into the water, it was unretrievable.
‘It took such a long time to find me. It’s an understatement to say it wasn’t a great situation. It wasn’t that I was lost.
‘the problem was I couldn’t move to get out of there. I’ve got a broken leg and I’m missing a kneecap. It needs complete reconstruction.’
Speaking from the UK, a source close to Nicholls said: ‘He was out there by himself because he was between filming. He needs surgery. But it’s going to cost £90,000 to have it in thailand.
‘the British embassy want to fly him back here. they need to fly him to the mainland first to a proper hospital and then decide whether to bring him back to the UK or do the surgery there.’
Nicholls’s first TV appearance was aged ten in Granada television show Children’s Ward. Since eastenders, he has appeared in shows including Law and Order UK, Casualty and Grantchester. In Ackley Bridge, he plays a teacher in a secondary school where British British communities Asian merge. and white Nicholls has previously blamed eastenders for his struggle with drink and drugs. He said: ‘People said I had too much too soon when I was playing Joe Wicks, and maybe they were right. I didn’t want to be a heartthrob, and I could not handle the attention.’
‘I am lucky to be alive’