Emmerdale viewers have been gripped over recent months by the storyline about Ivy – the baby born after Rhona Goskirk (Zoe Henry)’s ex-husband Gus Malcolms (Alan McKenna) fraudulently used embryos that he and Rhona had had frozen when they were married.
As well as being a first for British TV because the storyline tackled a subject that had never been explored in a soap, it was a complex story to tell, as Zoe Henry explained to Metro.co.uk.
‘There’s nothing straightforward about it and I hadn’t realised the legalities of how it is Rhona’s egg that helps to create the embryo but she has no legal rights because she hasn’t birthed it,’ she said.
While Rhona is a popular character with viewers, her behaviour in taking Ivy away from the village to stop Gus taking her to live in France has met with some criticism.
‘I dipped my toe into social media yesterday and very quickly dipped it back out again because it wasn’t very nice,’ Zoe said. ‘People are not very happy about what Rhona’s done.’
The actress agrees that the situation is anything but straightforward.
‘I get it and people go “Well it’s his baby,” and I think actually that’s probably the root of it.
‘I’ve said this so many times, nobody’s right and nobody’s wrong, he shouldn’t have stolen the embryos and forged the signature but at the end of the day they are both parents, Marlon (Mark Charnock) included, they’re all involved, it’s very complex.’
Zoe revealed that she was surprised by all the twists and turns the story took – especially one very dramatic incident that completely turned the story on its head – the death of Gus’s wife, Lucy, soon after Ivy’s birth.
‘I didn’t know that Lucy was going to die, that shocked me, that was a big one,’ Zoe said.
‘I thought that perhaps we’d work our way to co-parent and that might bring Alan into the show or whatever, but no, we had absolutely no idea, and I’m not sure they did, actually, when they started.
‘Because this has never been done before and there are so many legal loopholes and ways you could go with this, but they had to tell it truthfully. It’s been fascinating, really.’
Because this was a situation that had never been explored before in a drama, the show had to be incredibly careful with how they handled it. Zoe, along with Mark Charnock, Alan McKenna and others involved in the story, had to make sure they played every nuance of the story as it unfolded.
‘We can’t drop the ball at all,’ Zoe told us. ‘There’s been points where we’ve had conversations and gone “Hang on a minute, what’s happened? When was that?” We’ve had to do our homework just to stay true to the story, to the line of how it’s been played, because there’s been so many twists and turns. It’s been good.’
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As for what could happen to Ivy in the long term, Zoe said that it’s something they expect to revisit in the future.
‘To our knowledge, we’ve certainly not tackled that in the scripts but I don’t doubt they will bring that in at a later point, once the child’s a little older, that sort of thing, or once Gus comes back.’
If Gus is heading for prison as seems likely, Rhona might be hoping for a long sentence for him but Zoe isn’t, because she enjoys working with Alan McKenna.
‘Personally, we’d quite like it to be a short sentence because we love Alan. I would happily have him in the village.’
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