Emmerdale's Joe Absolom teases bad boy Ray’s future and mystery link to the village

Forcing April Windsor into becoming a drugs mule as she celebrates turning 16 is a pretty clear indication of Ray’s ruthlessness, one of the many unredeeming features that attracted Joe Absolom to the role.

“I really liked the concept of coming into the village as a bad guy,” reveals the actor, speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com. “He’s this Fagin-type presence, a lot of my scenes end with me peeling off wads of cash to various young actors, their eyes light up and I drive off in my sleek car.

“It’s creepy. Ray’s business model is to find vulnerable teenagers who are impressed with cash and gifts and attention, all they have to do is take a rucksack somewhere and they’ll get 50 quid.”

Ray was introduced as an old mate of Mackenzie Boyd, tapped up to sell Lewis Barton’s hefty consignment of medicinal marijuana. It later transpired one of Ray’s young foot soldiers was homeless teen Dylan Penders. When Dylan returned to the village to pursue his romance with April Windsor, who he met while she was living on the streets, Ray followed – and instantly spied an opportunity.

“Ray sees Dylan and April share this romantic kiss in the rain. If he can get Dylan on board as part of his workforce he could get April too, then he can use and manipulate them both.

“People like Ray in this county lines world trap kids into what they call ‘debt bondage’, buying them expensive trainers and making them take payment for delivering drugs, then telling them the amount they’ve collected isn’t enough so now they owe him – these vulnerable young people are working to pay off a supposed debt. It’s a very dark situation.”

There’s more to Ray than meets the eye, and Absolom teases there are hidden elements to the character and a mysterious link to somebody else in the Dales. All will become clear in due course, but for now Ray is ramping up his manipulation of Emmerdale’s youth, pitting Absolom against one of soap’s most gifted young actors, Amelia Flanagan, who recently won Best Young Performer at the British Soap Awards.

“I didn’t realise Amelia had been here nearly 12 years, and she’s only 17. You have to be on your game with her, if I leave a gap while I’m thinking about my next line, she’ll tell me what the line is! I can’t get away with anything. And Fred Kettle, who plays Dylan, is great too. I enjoy working with the young guys.”

When Absolom was Flanagan’s age, he too was working on a soap, playing Matthew Rose in EastEnders, who first appeared in 1997: a vulnerable teenager intimidated by a grown-up gangster and forced into a hideous crime. Sound familiar? The part of Ray really is a full-circle moment.

“I spent the best part of a year with Martin Kemp standing over me and manipulating my character,” recalls Absolom. “Now I’m the older statesman doing the same to these young kids! I saw Martin recently at the British Soap Awards, he said he’d been watching my stuff and reckons I’ve been stealing his moves.”

Kemp memorably played sharp-suited bad boy Steve Owen, who murdered his ex-lover Saskia and forced mild-mannered Matthew into helping him bury the body, then tried to frame the teenager. The pair’s dynamic was electric, and Absolom reflects on how the storyline propelled him from jobbing child actor to soap opera sensation.

“When I was very young my parents put me and my sister with an agent to make a bit of extra money. I did lots of adverts, then dramas like Silent Witness and Dangerfield. I really liked being on set and would watch how it all worked.”

After a few years of intense rivalry with sinister Steve, culminating in a shocking act of revenge, Absolom decided to leave Albert Square in 2000, partly thanks to some advice from one of the country’s leading actors.

“I met John Simm at a gig, he said you’ve done well at EastEnders but should think about moving on. So I blame him! I knew I couldn’t stay there forever, and had seen actors who had been on the show for a long time and loved it suddenly have their contracts end. It could be brutal. But I knew it would be difficult to sustain being a jobbing actor.”

He needn’t have worried, as life after Walford saw Absolom work consistently in a slew of acclaimed dramas, and in 2004 he started playing a character that would bring him global recognition – likeable Al Large in ITV’s phenomenally successful Doc Martin, opposite Martin Clunes as the grumpy GP of a Cornish coastal town.

Absolom was there from beginning to end, when the show bowed out with a Christmas special after 18 years in 2022, and the idyllic location inspired a permanent move to Cornwall, where he still lives with his wife and three children.

“We still get Japanese tourists in Port Isaac, where we filmed, looking for the doctor’s house. My brother was on holiday in Croatia with his family, switched on the telly and Doc Martin was there with dubbed Croatian voices! It really has gone around the world, mainly I think because the scenery looked so good. Sometimes we’d do a take and they’d ask us not to start talking because a boat was about to enter the shot behind us.

“It’s particularly huge in America where it’s shown on PBS, the public broadcaster. I went to Boston with Ian MacNeice, who played my character’s dad, Bert. He took a bum bag full of his own pictures which made me laugh, but we went to a bar and everybody was like: ‘Hey, it’s Bert!’ They all wanted a picture, we had a great night chatting with everyone about Doc Martin.

“It was a bit under-appreciated by the industry here I felt – they were a bit snobby about it and saw it as a cosy, comfortable show where nothing much happens. People who make television don’t necessarily watch it. But it stands up, you can watch it with your kids and your grandkids and it’s very funny, Martin is a genuinely brilliant actor who created a great character.”

Coming out of a long-running primetime hit, Absolom could presumably cherry pick what work he does. So what was the appeal of returning to the genre where he started, more than 25 years later? “As an actor you want to work. The idea of doing soap again where you get constant scripts for a few months really appealed to me.”

Ray is definitely someone to keep an eye on, as his long-term story is only just beginning, with plenty of curveballs ahead.

“We’re going to see all facets of Ray’s character as it goes on, and discover he’s actually a bit sad and lost. He is a different version of himself with different characters, controlling one minute, meek the next. The potential to go quite dark with this was an attractive proposition – I’d rather be a miserable baddie than a happy-go-lucky fella!”

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Emmerdale airs weeknights at 7:30pm on ITV1. Stream on ITVX.

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