New Emmerdale cast member Darcy Gray has revealed that his character Marcus Dean is “quite similar” to his father – the villainous Pierce Harris.
Gray is set to make his debut on the soap next week, with the arrival of Marcus set to bring about a major shock for Pierce’s ex-partner Rhona Goskirk.
And speaking to RadioTimes.com and other press, the actor said that although Marcus strives to be a very different person from his dad, there are some areas in which they are more alike than he’d like to admit.
“I think we all don’t think that we’re like our parents in real life,” he explained. “Me and my dad, I know him very well but I didn’t grow up with him and so there’s always been a separation even though we’ve been empathetically close but I’ve always thought ‘I’m not really like him, I’m definitely like my mum.’
“But as I’m growing slightly older, I’m noticing little bits that I’m like ‘My dad reacts like that, my dad does those sorts of things’ so I think Marcus likes to think he’s nothing like his dad but I think that instinctual thing comes out of him through the story, that’s the bit that we’ll tend to see that he is quite similar to his dad at some point.”
Speaking more generally about the character, Gray said that Marcus is “a bit of an outcast” and revealed that he is entering “quite an exciting point in his life” when he arrives in the village.
“He’s very interesting, I think, he’s also a bit of an outcast, he doesn’t necessarily know what his position is and the interesting point at this part of the storyline is that all of a sudden it has shifted what he thought was a calm life,” he said.
“He’s got himself a job, he knows where his mum lives and he thought he knew where he was, and then all of a sudden this piece of information comes through about his dad and it’s just shifted things and reverted it back to this unstable position for him.
“The reason I think he’s an outcast is because he’s always had that pressure from his dad. He left when he was so young and so he never had that clear path that a lot of people do have, usually, and so now that he has come to the village, it’s kind of an open book as to where the next stage of Marcus goes, so that’s why I think it’s quite an exciting point in his life.”
Additional reporting by Johnathon Hughes.
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