Former Emmerdale actor Matthew Wolfenden has revealed the real reason why he quit the ITV soap.
The star played David Metcalfe between 2006 and 2023, and in his time he's been involved in a lot of relationship storylines, most notably the one with Maya Stepney, who was secretly grooming his son Jacob Gallagher.
In a new interview with The Sun, he explained that he decided to leave the soap because of a rule in place that would have meant he couldn't accept the role of Buddy the Elf in the stage show of Elf.
"The problem is they don't let people out at Christmas to do panto, because their reasoning is 'if we let one person out, we’ve got to open it up to everyone and we could lose half our cast at Christmas'," he said.
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"Not that Elf was a pantomime, it was a big West End musical, but it was over panto season and they said 'if we set a precedence to let you out for three months to do that we've got to let other people out too.' And I absolutely understood that.
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"My contract was coming to an end and I had this big decision to make, do I leave an 18-year job to do an eight-week show?"
Reflecting on his decision, he did admit that it was "a little crazy" to leave a well paid full-time job to do an eight-week show, but he thought he needed to take the leap.
"I’m 44 now, I was 43 at the time," he said, "and I thought, 'If I don’t do it now then I’ll never do it.'"
Wolfenden said that he really appreciated Emmerdale boss John Whiston emailing him to say that they weren't going to kill David off, so the door was open for a potential return, and that's something he might do one day.
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"I absolutely adored [Emmerdale] and [my decision] had nothing to do with the fact that I wasn't enjoying it anymore, it was just that I wanted to go out and spread my wings and do some more musical theatre," he continued.
"When I got the part of David, I'd been in the West End for four, nearly five years, doing musical theatre and I loved it.
"Then the part of David in Emmerdale came up for three months and I thought great I’ll go see my mum and dad for a bit and then head back down to London to do more musical theatre. Three months turned into six months and then 18 years later I was still there!
"It was always a thing for me that I wanted to go back to musical theatre, or do some plays. So I bit the bullet."
Emmerdale airs on weeknights at 7.30pm on ITV1, and streams on ITVX.
