EastEnders’ Michelle Ryan reveals why she changed her mind on returning as Zoe Slater after 20 years away

ZOE: You ain’t my mother!

Beat.

KAT: Yes I am!

Watched by an audience of some 19 million, that moment in late 2001 when Kat revealed to a stroppy Zoe (Michelle Ryan) that they were not sisters, as Zoe had thought, as indeed Zoe had been told by her whole family for her entire life, cemented the Slaters as a cornerstone clan of Albert Square.

They arrived in Walford in September 2000, a shower of shrieking banshees, causing a commotion on the day of Ethel Skinner’s funeral. It was a carefully considered collision of old and new, a changing of the guard moment for the BBC soap. Like the Battersbys in Coronation Street and the Dingles in Emmerdale, the Slaters were disruptors who generated stories by antagonising, or seducing, their neighbours. Audiences were divided between Slater fans and Slater haters, but there was one thing everyone agreed upon: you couldn’t ignore them.

The confrontation between Kat and Zoe had been the culmination of years of planning. We the audience had known that Kat was Zoe’s mum since Kat and her dad Charlie’s heart-to-heart six months prior, in which she shared how hard it was treating her child like her sister. The “big reveal” on that autumn night was only really news to Zoe. The shock for the audience was discovering the exact nature of Zoe’s parentage – that, at 13, Kat had been raped by her uncle Harry and that she’d carried the resulting pregnancy to term with the baby then raised by Kat’s mother, Viv, as her own.

It was a fantastic back-story, making sense of Kat as a character and confirming her status as a survivor, tough as old boots but carrying damage you could see from space. For Zoe, however, the clash marked a high point for a character who was arguably never more compelling than in its immediate aftermath. When Zoe left Albert Square in 2005, tears were shed but there was no “Don’t Go, Zo” campaign.

Cut to 20 years later and Zoe has come home to Walford. And no one is more surprised than Michelle Ryan. After all, she’d been asked back before and always declined. “In the past, the timing just wasn’t right. I didn’t feel a need to do it and, for me, there always has to be a need,” Ryan explains, relaxing after the Radio Times photoshoot with a glass of what might be champagne. “This time, I surprised myself with how open I was to it.”

She continues: “It was the 40th [anniversary of EastEnders, in February] and there was a lot of buzz about it. I happened to have just joined Instagram at that time and I saw some of the fan comments and was really moved by them. Then I met up with Kacey [Ainsworth, who played another Slater sister, Little Mo] and we were reminiscing about the good times, how it was primetime television, and there were such great scripts. Kacey and I were saying how lucky we were to be a group of women, a family of women, that were at the forefront of all these huge storylines that hadn’t really been explored before.”

Ryan mentioned all this to her agent “and she was like, ‘Are you psychic? I’ve had EastEnders on the phone.’” So, what had changed for Ryan?

“I just want to be working more regularly,” she says with refreshing candour. “I really had loved the freedom of going from job to job, doing theatre and then maybe a film and building an eclectic CV. But there comes a time when you think, actually, it would be great to have a routine.”

Ryan’s post-EastEnders CV certainly qualifies as eclectic: a recurring role in Merlin as sorceress Nimueh, a guest role in Doctor Who, a part in Steven Moffat’s Jekyll and the lead in the short-lived remake of Bionic Woman that necessitated a move to America.

Turning her back on Albert Square was never a move the 41-year-old actor regretted. “I started so young and I just wanted to explore different things. Leaving was a tough decision because we’d had a really good run, but things went quiet and you have to decide: stay and keep doing the same sorts of storylines, or leave? I was in my 20s and so I thought I’d jump.”

Chief among Ryan’s reasons for leaving was her dislike of long contracts. “I’d done a three-year and then a two-year and I was done at five years. When Bionic Woman came up, it was a seven-year contract. I really didn’t want to take it, but it was another of those ‘nothing to lose’ moments. I was 21 with no US credits, so I took it. With those big contracts, you have to be in the mindset for them. So probably to my detriment, I’ve turned some down, because you realise that they don’t always run that long.” Bionic Woman, for example, was cancelled after eight episodes.

Now armed with a contract shorter than in her previous run on the Square, Ryan seems unfazed by the long days on set ahead of her. In fact, now she’s back, she says she relishes the workload. “The other day, we did a three-page scene with edits, one rehearsal, one take, and that was it. The quality was there, but you won’t do that speed on anything else. When we were discussing some of the storylines for Zoe, one of the directors said, ‘You will get match-fit again’. And he’s so right. because you can audition for things, you can be working on a series or a play, but there isn’t anything like a soap. And it’s just so good for the mind.”

Ryan’s clearly very pragmatic – she concedes that as an actor in her 40s, job offers may not be as forthcoming as they once were – but all the same, returning to EastEnders must have more allure than a nice routine and keeping her mentally sharp? It’s good for the heart too, no?

“Jessie is one of the best actresses I’ve ever worked with,” Ryan says. “The rapport we have and our friendship off screen as well, it all just feeds into that mother-daughter bond. On set, it’s like having someone in your corner all the time and always knowing that I’ll be fine. I can just talk to Jessie. We have a shorthand, and we have a similar kind of view on the characters and their journey.”

They’re so in-sync that when it was suggested that there might be some sort of call-back to those famous lines or that they might be somehow repeated, “Instinctively, we were like, ‘We don’t think so,’ because it’s such a classic. So, we’ve had a little bit of input in certain areas, which you get from years of experience.”

Ryan is undaunted by the prospect of returning to the tabloid glare, or of attracting attention. In contrast to Wallace, she says she now has very little experience of people shouting at her in the street. A bonus, perhaps, of an eclectic CV.

“From the first day the Slaters were aired, I had someone shout out ‘Zoe’ to me and that continued until lockdown – that changed everything in the world. Now, I’m not really sure that it affects my life too much. I have realised that you need a profile, because without one, you can’t get the jobs that you want to be doing. I sort of stepped back, which was my choice, but then if you step back too far, then you suddenly aren’t on people’s radar.

“So, a little bit of being recognised is important, even if you don’t get to choose it. But if people are shouting things out, it comes with the job, and it’s kind of key, because it means that people want to see you.”

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