Jessie Wallace has opened up on the famous ‘You ain’t my mother’ EastEnders scene with her on-screen daughter, Zoe Slater and admits it was supposed to be very different
Jessie Wallace has revealed that she changed the way in which her line was delivered in the iconic EastEnders scene in which she revealed she was Zoe Slater’s mother rather than her sister.
And the actress, 53, has called for a return for Zoe – played by Michelle Ryan – who hasn’t been seen in Walford since 2005. Speaking on co-star Lacey Turner’s new podcast, on the eve of the soap’s 40th anniversary next month, Jessie revealed just how the scene played out on the day it was filmed in 2001.
In the story, Zoe is fed up of being bossed around by Kat, yelling at her outside The Queen Vic: “You can’t tell me what to do – you ain’t my mother,” to which Kat explodes: “Yes I am!”
Jessie explained she didn’t think that the three words would work if said quietly, which is how he’d been told to deliver them. “Tony Jordan had written it as I whispered it and I was like, ‘no, if I’ve been holding this for 18 years, I’m going to scream it out’.”
Only Kat and Stacey Slater remain out of the original four-strong “sisterhood” (Image: BBC)
Actress Michelle was last seen departing Albert Square four years after leaning that Kat had, in fact, given birth to her. On her podcast We Started Here Lacey, 36, suggested to Jessie: “I’d love it if she came back. Would you? ‘Hello Mum’. Oh, that’s given me goosebumps,” Jessie agreed. “Can we make that happen? I think it’d be great. I think it would be lovely.”
Thinking back to the extraordinary TV moment, which was watched by 19 million viewers at the time, Jessie said it had been an incredibly tough storyline to film. “I was so honoured that they gave that storyline for me to carry – but it was really hard,” she said. “And this is back in the day when we used to get like sackfuls of fan mail, and the majority were teenage girls that were going through the same thing, that were relating to Kat and coming to me for help. But I’m an actor and it had to be passed on to the NSPCC, which was really tough.”
She said that the backstory between Kat having given birth to her “sister” Zoe also got changed, this time by former executive producer John Yorke. “Originally Kat had Zoe when she was 12, but John changed it to she was 14, so now I’ve got to carry around the fact that Kat’s two years older than me.”
In 2017, when she was on one of her many breaks from the soap, Jessie admitted she was fed up with fans shouting the line at her in street. She confessed: “Someone did it yesterday and I just gave them a dirty look. When people see me they say ‘Go on… say it, say it’ and I’m just like ‘no’.”
Cousins Kat and Stacey Slater have been in the soap, on and off, for more that two decades (Image: BBC/Jack Barnes/Kieron McCarron)
But speaking now, she laughs: “I think the Slaters are just funny and I’m fortunate enough to get really good one liners, and they follow me around everywhere.”
In the podcast the actress also gets emotional as the recalls how close she came to pursuing an entirely different career as a make-up artist but was inspired to go to drama school by the writer Sarah Phelps, who worked alongside her backstage at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Growing tearful Jessie said: “ I was watching a Les Enfants du Paradis with Helen McCrory and I thought, ‘I want to be an actress now. I want to do that’. And I told Sarah, I didn’t tell anyone else.
“I feel a bit emotional talking about that. Because it was such a lovely time of my life. Carefree and learning.”
Eastenders celebrates its 40th anniversary on February 19. We Started Here is available on podcast platforms from Tuesday.
