Coronation Street legend Bill Ward hopes ‘brave’ storyline stands the test of time

A whole new audience are discovering wicked Coronation Street villain Charlie Stubbs following repeat broadcasts on ITV3. Two decades on, actor Bill Ward is taking on a new project in his hometown – and is reflecting on how he worked Charlie’s inner-psych.

Research is key for Bill, 57, who has played a number of complex roles throughout his career. He aspires to look beyond a character’s archetype, and explore the reasons behind their motivations.

‘I do lots of kind, gentle and upstanding characters but nobody seems to want to talk about them!’ he exclusively told Metro this week, after a successful opening night of Gerry and Sewell at Newcastle Theatre Royal.

‘The last part I did was in The Full Monty playing a completely hopeless individual. I’ve played a drag queen in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ he explained.

‘I try and go back to the source material and work out how these people tick. You try and get inside of their head.

‘You have to try and be on their side, you can’t judge them and it’s your job to try and portray them and embody them the best you can – but I do take the gentle point that I have played a number of nasty pieces of work.’

Gerry and Sewell has been adapted from a novel, The Season Ticket by Jonathan Tulloch which in turn inspired the 2000 comedy drama Purely Belter.

It follows two young lads who go to somewhat extreme measures to get their hands on the cash to afford season tickets at Newcastle United’s St. James’ Park.

The film stars his former Emmerdale co-star Charlie Hardwick, who played Val Pollard, someone who he described as ‘Geordie acting royalty’ after first watching it in preparation for the new part.

The character in question – Mr McCarten, the father of Gerry – is ‘the play’s darkness’, Bill tells me.

‘It’s a kind of rollercoaster ride of hope and desperation and my character is there to provide some of the obstacles to them getting what they want. He’s a very nasty piece of work.’

Soap fans will of course remember him as James Barton in the ITV soap, before he was killed off in 2016. He returned the following year as a ghostly vision through his wife Emma’s (Gillian Kearney) eyes.

Prior to that he was best known as builder Charlie Stubbs in Coronation Street, the show’s main antagonist over his four year stint.

He began a relationship with vulnerable landlady Shelley Unwin (Sally Lindsay), and caused a rift between her and mother Bev (Susie Blake).

On one occasion he ripped out Shelley’s earrings in a vicious rage, and in scenes that have recently been repeated each weekday lunchtime on ITV3, he hit her in the face with a door.

In order to mask her black eye, he locked her in the Rovers’ bedroom for weeks, staying hidden from her concerned friends and family downstairs. After jilting him on their wedding day, she finally began to rebuild her life.

‘I heard that (it was being re-shown). It’s great. Hopefully it stands the test of time. It was a really powerful storyline when it [originally] aired and specifically it was about psychological abuse’ Bill explained.

‘The storyline they sought to do was very brave at the time, as Charlie took apart his partners, or whoever got in his way, bit by bit. He did it over a prolonged period of time.

‘He always carried that physical threat and you always knew that he had that in his locker, but how he chose to operate was through control and mentally picking someone apart.’

He continued: ‘You can only really do that in long-form television. We did it over six months of a year, where he took Shelley apart and it made quite difficult viewing.

‘It was quite brave for the producers and the writers but was hugely rewarding to do. It was as accurate as we could make it.

‘The writers did a lot of research and I know Sally did too. We had a great responsibility to the storyline.’

On his own research, Bill added: ‘I spent a lot of time with Women’s Aid. They were hugely helpful with me in terms of getting inside of his head, but also I spoke to an awful lot of women who had been on the receiving end of real-life people who had similar behaviours to Charlie.

‘I’ve been an ambassador for Women’s Aid ever since.’

In 2007, the character finally got his comeuppance when he was whacked over the head with a ornament by his girlfriend Tracy Barlow (Kate Ford).

She’d warned him some months before against cheating on her, threatening to make him suffer.