‘Emmerdale’ actor Matthew Wolfenden has opened up about his character David Pollard’s upcoming testicular cancer storyline, revealing that he will be losing his hair for it.
Viewers recently saw David being told that a lump on his testicle could be cancerous, and Dr. Bailey will now tell him that it is.
Speaking to Huffington Post UK and other reporters, Matthew opened up about the physical changes he’ll be making for the storyline.
“I got called into make up to talk about how I feel about it,” he said. “I will lose everything. The whole hog and do it properly.
“It will be the full works, eyebrows off, beard off, hair off.
“I didn’t want to go half-hearted with it, because that is not fair when there’s people out there that have suffered with it properly, and I am just pretending.”
However, the diagnosis isn’t won’t go smoothly, as Dr Bailey, who is currently preoccupied with his affair with Belle, will first accidentally tell David that his test results are clear.
Matthew explained: “David leaves [the surgery] and goes to celebrate in the pub with Jacob, and his dad and Leyla, saying: “I am all clear, everything’s fine.
“Then Dr Bailey finds the correct paper and it says it is actually cancer. He told him he is all clear and he is not.”
“He goes to see David, who he is as high as a kite and a bit drunk, and he sits him down and says, ‘I have made a mistake and it is a bad one’.”
The twist in the tale was added by incoming producer Iain MacLeod, who recently took over from Kate Oates.
“It is quite clever as you see David going from there [up on a high], back down to rock bottom,” Matthew said of the plot twist. “And at the end, it is him, Leyla and Pollard coming to find him, [where he’s] sat on the stairs crying, saying ‘I have got cancer.’”
These ‘Emmerdale’ scenes air from Monday 11 April. Catch up on all the latest soap news and spoilers here.