Emmerdale’s Dominic Brunt reveals thing that confused cast about death story
When Ray Walters’ (Joe Absolom) body was found in the back of a van in Emmerdale, there was no shortage of possible killers who could have put him there.
In fact so many people had a strong motive and an excellent opportunity to kill the drug and people trafficker who’d brought such misery to the village that a week of episodes focused on the different suspects in flashback.
Was it Marlon (Mark Charnock), heading out with a knife to avenge his daughter? Or had Graham Foster (Andrew Scarborough) perhaps employed his SAS skills to sort out the problem on Rhona (Zoe Henry)’s behalf? Did Ross (Mike Parr) and April (Amelia Flanagan) have a hand in it?
Jaws hit the floor when the killer turned out to be Bear Wolf (Joshua Richards), mainly because everybody thought that Bear had been killed by Celia (Jaye Griffiths). He turned up at his son Paddy Kirk (Dominic Brunt)’s house and in dramatic and emotional scenes he killed Ray to stop him from hurting Paddy.
‘I think Paddy was feeling ridiculously guilty that Bear might have gone missing and died a while ago and then he turns up!’ Dominic Brunt said of his character’s reaction at that moment.
With Dylan (Fred Kettle) and Paddy both witnesses to what had happened as well as moving the body to one of the depot’s vans – which was later driven away by an oblivious Jai (Chris Bisson) – Paddy’s focus soon turned to protecting his dad from the consequences of his actions.
‘He’s juggling everything at the moment, trying to keep everybody out of being done for murder and keeping the story straight,’ Dominic explained. ‘But it keeps unravelling and he keeps pulling all the strings back in, going, “Oh my God, we’ve got to stick to the story.” Of course they’ve got some wily policemen and detectives on their backs, which is not making it easy.’
Dominic told us that Paddy’s deepest fear is that he’ll lose his dad again.
‘He thought he was dead and he’s back. And now Bear might go down for murder. I think he trusts the judicial process, but the fact Bear is struggling so badly from what he’s been through, he’s heavily drugged up, he’s psychologically in the midst of this Stockholm Syndrome.
‘So Paddy is really doing it to try and save his dad, and save the fact that Dylan would be implicated in it as well, because we all hid the body, really.’
Soap stars are very used to filming scenes not in chronological order, but even an experienced actor like Dominic found this storyline a bit of a challenge because it was often hard to remember how much Paddy would know in any given scene.
It was a challenge Dominic and his co-stars enjoyed, as he told us.
‘I was delighted, because it’s such a good story. It was this whodunit and even watching it now, we were filming scenes where the director would have to say, “You don’t know now. So when you say ‘We don’t know,’ you really don’t know.”
‘Then the next thing they’d be going, “Now this is the flashback, you do know but nobody else knows and the audience don’t know. And then in this one, you know, the audience knows but nobody else knows.” We were like, “What?!”’
All of the deliberate confusion paid off with the shock reveal that Bear wasn’t dead, but going forward Paddy’s focus is on keeping the secret and protecting Bear and Dylan.
‘He keeps going, “Should I go to the police? Should I just come clean? Should I tell them the truth?”’ he explained. ‘But he’s just not ready. Bear is too ill. His dad is all over the place, he’s very sick, withdrawing from whatever drugs he was given and he’s completely unstable. So Paddy is trying to hide him away for now. He’s just trying to save his dad from more psychological pain after what he’s just been through with Ray and Celia.