EastEnders star Natalie Cassidy has revealed a behind-the-scenes secret that has had a surprisingly big effect on the show’s scripts over the years when playing the character of Sonia Fowler
EastEnders viewers have seen more than their fair share of drama over the years, with births, deaths and marriages seemingly every other week. But one thing you won’t often see on the long-running BBC soap is eating.
Natalie Cassidy, who has been an Albert Square stalwart for over 20 years, revealed on the Off Menu podcast that there’s a very good reason why that is. She told hosts Ed Gamble and James Acaster: “We find it quite difficult, because when you’re doing lots of scenes, and you’ve got a lot food involved… if you forget a line you have to go back to the top so you don’t want to eat a lot.
“If you do, you set yourself up for eight times that. So you see a lot of sipping, a lot of fork holding, not loads of eating.”
The launderette is a major location in Albert Square, but you’ll see very few restaurant scenes (Image: BBC/Jack Barnes/Kieron McCarron)
Perhaps it’s for that reason that food isn’t a major factor in EastEnders storylines. The only instance Natalie can remember, she says, is the saga of Denise Fox: “Denise Fox was quite poor, and, she was found eating stuff out of a bin.”
In her private life, Natalie is a pretty sensible eater. At one point, though she dropped a sizeable amount of weight as part of a deal to sell DVDs. She told podcaster Grace Dent: “I was very overweight and they approached me and said: ‘Listen, we’re going to give you £100,000, we’re going to get you really fit and you’re going to lose four stone’.”
Natalie lost four stone for a fitness DVD (Image: Publicity Picture)
“I was like ‘Happy days, let’s go for it.’ I just thought, that’s a lot of money, but it wasn’t the right thing to do. It wasn’t – you are losing a lot of weight in a three or four-month period, twelve or sixteen weeks, low calories and training every day.
“I got there, and as soon as that DVD came out, I ate for England. I put all the weight back on in eight weeks.”
She jokes that it was her love of mayonnaise that spelled the end of her super-svelte body.
