Chanel Cresswell picked up a BAFTA tonight (May 8) for her role as Kelly in This Is England '90, but as the actress shared afterwards, Kelly wasn't always going to get a happy ending.
"Kelly is literally everything to me - she's an extension. I don't look at her like a character, I do look at her like she's part of me," Cresswell told Digital Spy and others in the winner's room at the House of Fraser British Academy Television Awards.
"It was a different story ending when we were doing 90, and it was something really tragic that was going to happen to Kelly that nobody knew about and I was absolutely in floods of tears.
"I begged Shane [Meadows] for it not to happen, and that's when I realised that that's how much she meant to me. If anything happened to her I just instantly started crying."
The actress then conceded that stirring up those kinds of emotions is how writer Meadows is able to get such a great performance out of his cast.
"I think that's how Shane works though," she added. "What you're acting you are going through. And there's a very fine line between acting and real life, and I've never had that in anything else that I've done, it's only on This Is England.
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"And only now I'm starting to act more that I'm starting to realise that the thinner you make that line, the better the performance is, in a way."
Cresswell picked up the award for Best Supporting Actress during the BAFTA TV Awards ceremony, beating out competition from Michelle Gomez, Lesley Manville and Eleanor Worthington-Cox.
The ceremony aired on BBC One.
Naomi Gordon is news writer mainly covering entertainment news with a focus on celebrity interviews and television.
