EastEnders/Trivia

• But I Play One on TV: Evangelical Christian Dot Cotton is played by Jewish actress June Brown.
• Dawson Casting: The E20 Gang. Sam Attwater who plays Leon is 24. Poppy, who at a guess is 21/22 is played by Rachel Bright, who is 29 as of June 2013 and Shivani Ghai, who played the 23-24 year old Ayesha was according to reports born in 1975, making her 37/38. Wikipedia however now has her age as a slightly younger 31/32.
  • Averted with Michelle Ryan, who was 16 when she was cast as the 16-year-old Zoe Slater.
  • Subverted with Wendy Richard, who by the time of this series was over 40 and had been acting for over 25 years, took the role specifically because she was tired of playing younger, "glamorous" characters.
  • Averted with Hetti Bywater who plays Lucy Beale is all most a year younger then her character.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Jill Halfpenny really did have her own hair chopped off for the scene where Chrissie cuts Kate's hair in revenge.
• Hey, It's That Guy!: The guy who killed Saskia used to play bass guitar in Spandau Ballet.
  • When Eastenders was first introduced, its creators tried to avoid casting actors who the viewing public would recognise as "stars". The two main aversions to this were Wendy Richard and Susan Tully.
  • Indeed, many alumni of Grange Hill ended up appearing in Eastenders. As well as the afore-mentioned Susan Tully (Suzanne Ross in Grange Hill and Michelle Fowler in Eastenders), both actors to play the role of Mark Fowler appeared in Grange Hill.
  • Former Eastenders actors had a habit of turning up as characters in The Bill: Irene Raymond (Roberta Taylor) = Gina Gold, Mark Fowler Mk II (Todd Carty) = Gabriel Kent, Ruby Allen (Louisa Lytton) = Beth Green, Natalie Evans (Lucy Speed) = Stevie Moss etc.
• Hey, It's That Place!: While still under construction, the Albert Square set doubled as the Dusseldorf construction site employing the main characters in the first series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
• McLeaned: Martine McCutcheon who played Tiffany Mitchell.
• Name's the Same: Billy Mitchell and Billie Jackson, Big Mo and Little Mo, Tiffany Mitchell and Tiffany Dean. Both Billies are current characters, the Mos joined the show at the same time, and are grandmother and granddaughter, while Tiffany Dean was named after Tiffany Mitchell. There's bound to be other examples in such a Long Runner.
• The Other Darrin: Mark, Martin, Sam, Peggy, Steven, Peter, Lucy, Janine, Lauren, Ben, Lucy again.
  • Todd Carty took over the role of Mark Fowler after the original actor, David Scarboro, committed suicide.
  • Kim Medcalf replaced Danniella Westbrook as Sam Mitchell, after the latter was involved in a number of drug incidents. When Westbrook got better, she returned and Medcalf was promptly dropped.
  • In one of the most bizarre examples of this trope, the producers wanted more ethnic characters in the soap... and so replaced Janine Butcher's original actress, Rebecca Michaels (who was White British) with Alexa Demetriou (who was Southern European). She was restored to her former ethnicity when Demetriou was in turn replaced by Charlie Brooks.
  • When Alex Francis left to focus on school, he was replaced by Rory Stroud as Bobby Beale.
  • Peter Beale been played no less that 6 different actors.
  • Shabnam Masood was originally played by Zahra Ahmadi until she left in 2008. The role was taken by Rakhee Thakrar in 2014 when Shabnam returned to the square.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Notably Leslie Grantham (Den Watts) because of his cybersex scandal, but other actors have been suspended after arrests or drunken misbehavior.
• Wag the Director: June Brown, who plays Dot Cotton is every bit as much a devout Christian in real-life as Dot is on the show. For this reason, she refuses to say anything that might be considered blasphemous, or have Dot do anything un-Christian. Additionally, she forced the writers to add scenes showing Dot celebrating lesser-known Christian holidays such as Maundy Thursday, which she collected charity money for — though this being Eastenders, she was promptly mugged and the money stolen.