10 totally true FACTS about... Adam Rickitt
lnsidesoap YOUR BRIEFING ON THE MAN BEHIND HOLLYOAKS’ KYLE…
1 Adam Peter Rickitt was born on 29 May 1978 in Crewe, to parents Jill and Peter. He has three older brothers – Tim, Mark and Sam – and went to boarding school in Cumbria. Before acting, Adam was a child model. “I thought I was lucky as I had a family who supported me, and I got into showbiz straight after school, while I knew lots of people struggling.”
2 Adam suffered from bulimia as a teen, when his weight hit just six stone. It began after a rugby injury resulted in a hospital stay where he picked up a virus. The eating disorder developed when he had to put weight back on. “I got over the physical side of being sick in 18 months,” says Adam. “But the mental side took a long time.”
3 Adam shot to fame in 1997 when he joined Corrie as Nick Tilsley, taking over the role from Warren Jackson (below). “To start off, I’d never watched a single episode,” laughs Adam. “I didn’t have a clue what I was getting into.” Adam only auditioned as a joke and didn’t expect to get the part. “My manager said, ‘There’s an audition for Corrie – you won’t get it, but you can have a go’,” the star tells us. Adam left the role in 1999, before returning in 2002 for two years. Ben Price now plays Nick.
4 After leaving Corrie, Adam became a pop star. His first single, I Breathe Again, reached number five in the charts, no doubt helped by a music video which saw Adam naked in a test tube! Despite his initial success and signing a six-album deal, Adam was soon dropped by his record label. “There were some fun bits,” begins the star. “I did a gig in a square in Bangkok where 10,000 people were expected and 87,000 turned up. They were clambering over cars to see me – I was thinking, ‘I’m a boy from Cuddington in Cheshire, how did this happen?’”
5 From 2007 to 2010, Adam played Kieran Mitchell in the New Zealand soap, Shortland Street. After three years on the show, bosses decided to write him out. Kieran died when he fell off a cliff in a special 90-minute episode, which was the second-most watched episode of the soap ever.
6 Adam currently plays Kyle in Hollyoaks. He joined in 2017 as an old friend of Nancy Osborne, with the pair reunited at a multiple sclerosis support group. For Adam, the show has certainly been an experience. “I turned up on my first day and they shaved all my hair off – that was a bit of a shock,” he exclaims. “And I can now say that my first ever boy-on-boy kiss was with Duncan from Blue! That’s definitely a benchmark!”
7 In 2014, Adam married Good Morning Britain news reporter Katy Fawcett. The pair tied the knot after a two-year engagement and live together in Knutsford with their two rescue dogs, Tallulah and Rufus. “I reached 32, and thought, ‘Maybe I’ll be lucky in family and business, but not lucky in love’,” Adam tells us. “But Katy turned up to interview me, and immediately after, I rang my mum and said, ‘I’ve met the girl I’m going to marry’.”
8 Adam almost had a career in politics. With his part in Shortland Street only supposed to last a few months, he had planned to come back and change career paths. But when he got an offer to continue as Kieran, Adam stayed in New Zealand. “I was asked to stand for the Conservative Party by way of trying to get young people engaged in the voting process and politics,” he says. “It was just after a statistic came out that more people voted for Big Brother than they did in the general election. I never had any ambitions to become prime minister or anything like that!”
9 Adam stays in good shape because of a spinal condition.
“I have to work out for two hours every morning because I have ankylosing spondylitis [a rare disease which causes the spine’s vertebrae to fuse together if they remain still for too long],” explains the star. “When I wake up in the morning, I’m in a lot of pain so I go straight out for a nine-mile run. I also do press-ups, sits-ups and pull-ups.”
10 Adam turned 40 last year, and celebrated in style!
“My wife Katy and I went to Monaco for the weekend,” shares the actor. Adam also marked (literally) his milestone birthday by getting a tattoo. The inking is a verse in Italian and Latin – some of which made up part of his wedding vows!