Emmerdale villain Celia Daniels won’t be around forever, with actress Jaye Griffiths teasing she was told her role on the ITV soap would be limited due to her dark storyline
Despite playing the latest villain on Emmerdale, actress Jaye Griffiths has shared her joy playing the ITV soap role – but warned an exit looms.
The star said there’s something “freeing” about her villainous character Celia Daniels, who fans were introduced to back in June, before her dark crimes and link to fellow villain and ‘son’ Ray Walters were unearthed last month. Jaye, 62, admits feeling challenged by the role, but says Celia’s lack of a conscience is great fun.
Speaking to The Mirror, she said: “It’s joyful. The reason Celia works is because she has no little voice in her head. You know that little voice that tells women, particularly, that you’re not enough, you’re too tall, you’re too short, you’re too fat, you’re too thin, you’re too old, you’re too young.
“That self-critical, nasty voice that stops us doing many things. Celia doesn’t have one of those. That is very freeing. If there are no consequences internally, if there’s no conscience, you can do anything you want.”
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Recently we’ve seen Celia and Ray drag teens April Windsor and Dylan Penders into their dodgy drug deals, while also trying to force poor April into sexual exploitation. It’s certainly a different type of role to what Jaye is used to, having played respectable characters in shows including Casualty, Silent Witness and Doctors.
“I usually get the upstanding, morally robust people,” she told us. “Celia, her compass is buried. She doesn’t need one, she just needs to make money.” While it’s all fun and games, the dark nature of Jaye’s latest plot has been draining to film.
She shared: “When you have to shut down all feelings, shut down any regard you have for the people you’re with, it’s exhausting. When we do rehearsals, particularly if I’m going to be violent, and you hear the crew go, ‘ooh’ and then you have to go, ‘oh, I’m nice, really, I’m not really a sociopath’, it’s very freeing, but very tiring. Empathy for your fellow humans is what makes life, life. So to not have that, I get very lonely sometimes.”
More could be revealed about Celia’s past too, as Jaye said she wasn’t always so evil. She told us: “Something very, very bad has happened to her. Not to excuse her, but it would explain everything. She didn’t come out of the womb like this.”
While Jaye is having the time of her life with the show, she confirmed an exit would happen at some point. “I knew it was finite from the start, which I am very sad about,” she confesses. “I would like to stay forever, but it’s such a strong arc.”
As the soap tackles modern slavery in its latest hard-hitting plot, missing character Bear Wolf’s link to the storyline being revealed is just the start. Jaye said of the topic: “It’s just utterly depressing that we treat our fellow humans like this.”
Jaye hopes viewers will recognise that Celia is a character, and not remotely similar to who she is away from the soap. “I want to remind people that it’s just pretend and I am really nice and I’m not a sociopath,” she said.
As for Celia’s magnificent wardrobe, Jaye explained a secret, gory detail about her character’s famous cravats worn in most scenes, while also confessing the farmer persona is just an act.
Jaye tells us: “I love my scarves. I love my hat. I love it more than anything that she just walks around with this stick. It is glorious. I think she went through a catalogue going, ‘what do farmers wear? Oh, great, I’ll buy that!’ She doesn’t do farm work, I don’t think she’s been in a field in her life. Do you know why she wears a cravat?
“Someone tried to cut her head off. So it’s very subtle, and it’s only halfway across, because obviously they didn’t succeed. I asked our execs if they would not tell scripts, because I don’t want it ever mentioned. It’s just a hint of a former life elsewhere where bad things happened to her.”
Celia’s meddling in the village is set to continue, as she comes between son Ray and his new love interest Laurel Thomas. “Laurel goes to kiss him, and he won’t kiss her. That breaks Celia’s heart, because that means she’s not a floozy, she’s not a one-off.
“He’s so serious about her, he won’t even kiss her. He likes her that much, and that is too real for Celia. So now the possibility is he might leave her, and I think that would come close to breaking Celia.”
Emmerdale airs weeknights at 7:30pm on ITV1 and ITVX, with an hour-long episode on Thursdays. * Follow Mirror Celebs and TV on TikTok, Snapchat , Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube and Threads.