Katherine Kelly says 'Coronation Street' is an "animal like no other" in terms of the workload.
Katherine Kelly looks back on her time as Becky McDonald on Coronation Street
The 43-year-old actress played diamond-in-the-rough Becky Granger on the long-running ITV1 soap opera from 2006 until 2012 and reflected that her time on the show was incredibly hectic because she had to learn, rehearse, and film multiple episodes all at the same time.
She told Metro newspaper's SixtySeconds column: "It's an animal like no other in terms of TV. When I used to work with actors who did old-fashioned repertory seasons, they'd tell me how they'd be performing a play at night, rehearsing another in the day and learning the next one.
"That's what my time at 'Corrie' was like, because that character was like playing 10 characters in over four years and filming 15 episodes at once!"
Since her time on the cobbles, Katherine - who as former jailbird Becky became the 50th character to work as a barmaid in the famous Rovers Return Inn, had an ill-fated marriage to Steve McDonald (Simon Gregson) and attempted to buy her nephew Max from her sister Kylie but eventually left the Manchester backstreet for a new life in Barbados - has starred in dramas like 'Liar' and 'Happy Valley' but "doesn't have a preference" over the kind of role she takes on because it has to be "all about" the writing.
She added: "I don't have a preference; it's all about the script. Even though these have come out at the same time, I didn't shoot them directly after each other - I shot something quite serious in between. I have a production company now called Make Me and we made a comedy fiction podcast called 'Curl Up and D.I'in 2021 when they weren't massively a thing.
"It's written by Tony Pitts, starring Jim Moir [Vic Reeves], Morgana Robinson, Mark Benton and me, and it did really well. The world is more thirsty for comedy than ever with everything else that's going on. People want an escape.
Tagged in Katherine Kelly Vic Reeves Simon Gregson