Emmerdale star Michael Wildman, who plays Al Chapman, appeared on Loose Women on Wednesday where he spoke about Al’s sordid affair.
Al was engaged to Priya Kotecha (Fiona Wade) but was secretly seeing Debbie Dingle (Charley Webb) until the two women found out about each other and decided to conspire to take Al down.
But Michael believes Al really does love Priya, but he “has his weakness” which is why he also fell for Debbie, but not to the same extent.
Janet Street Porter asked: “Did people associate the character with you in real life, did people approach you and give you a bad time?”
Michael replied: “Luckily no, people who know me or live where I live, everyone is really supportive of what I am doing on the show and they know who I am.
“I am pretty sure I don’t share any traits with Al.
(Image: ITV)
“The thing is, I always believed with intimate scenes, and Fiona and I were cut short with our intimate scenes pretty early due to Covid.”
He joked: “I signed up to the next year because I thought I could snog her for a year!”
Asked whether he knew who Al’s mystery woman was going to be leading up to the big twist being revealed, Michael said he did not know it was Debbie until they filmed the scenes.
“I didn’t know until literally, maybe, well a week before,” he said.
“Charley and I never met before we did the scenes.
“They keep everything very close to their chest, those producers.”
He added that because of Covid restrictions, he was unable to get to know Charley before they filmed scenes together and he found that tough.
“It was quite difficult actually you know for both myself and Charley just not meeting at all and then having to get into that storyline, trying to mirror the relationship that Al has had with Priya,” he explained.
“So, you know, it wasn’t easy.”
* Loose Women airs weekdays on ITV at 12:30pm
Originally from https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/emmerdales-al-chapman-actor-took-23395895