Former Hollyoaks star Ricky Whittle makes surprise appearance at Monte-Carlo Television Festival after claiming he was 'done' chasing Hollywood roles
Former Hollyoaks star Ricky Whittle made a surprise appearance at the 64th Monte-Carlo Television Festival on Tuesday.
The Brit, 45, shot to fame in 2006 as Calvin Valentine on Hollyoaks, enjoying a four-year stint on the northern soap before his character was brutally murdered.
Ricky moved on to bigger things after his time on Channel 4 came to an end, with the actor making the move across the pond as he bagged roles in hit American shows such as The 100 and American Gods.
He turned his back on Hollywood in 2023, telling MailOnline he was 'done' with America and its 'crazy politics' and was planning to move away from Los Angeles.
But just a couple of years later it seems Ricky may be considering a return to the big time as the hunky actor made a surprise appearance at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival on Tuesday.
He arrived on the red carpet in southern France looking typically dapper in a black tux ahead of his role presenting the festival's Golden Nymph Awards Ceremony alongside Shy'm, 39.
The duo posed for photos together, with Ricky playfully making sure the spotlight was on the French actress as she put on a leggy display in an eye-catching black and white dress.
Later in the evening the pair suffered an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction while performing a dance routine on-stage as Shy'm spilled out her outfit momentarily.
Ricky had too been in attendance a day earlier, with the star showing off his enviable physique in a see-through black vest top teamed with a pair of baggy trousers.
He posed for photos alongside the glamorous Adriana Karembeu, 54, who stunned in a black blouse, a coordinated skirt and a pair of high heels.
Whittle was last seen on television while playing Mickey Barnes in one episode of The Rookie, a show following a police officer in Los Angeles.
Prior to that the 45-year-old had enjoyed a quiet couple of years work-wise after the end of American Gods in 2021.
Despite all of his success across the pond, during his interview with MailOnline in 2023 Ricky did not completely rule out a possible return to the British soap one day.
The duo posed for photos together, with Ricky playfully making sure the spotlight was on the French actress as she put on a leggy display in an eye-catching black and white dress
He said: 'Would I ever do a soap again? Probably not, but for fun why not, I don't care as I'm in a fortunate position, where I don't need to work.
'I haven't been in Hollyoaks for 20 years but at the end of the day you can never shy away from where you came from.'
He also opened up about the influence his time on Hollyoaks had on his acting skills, saying: 'If it wasn't for Hollyoaks I wouldn't be where I am now.
'Hollyoaks is an education, you're learning 12 to 15 scripts every day and halfway through a day, new pages are coming down and it's like "learn them now" and you just get it done and don't think about'.
'My character went from being the good guy, to the bad guy to the club owner, to the policeman, to your sister's on drugs, to you'd killed someone and then he's back to life - it's like you go through a whole gambit of emotions'.
'If that's not great education for an actor- I don't know what is.'
He added: 'I would never look down on soap actors because they're the ones that are putting in five days a week and I've got nothing but love for those guys and what that show did for me.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
26 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Want a pay rise? Take this French writer's hilarious advice
Georges Perec was attracted by formal challenges to writing: his most famous achievement was his novel La Disparition, written without using the letter 'e' once. (This is particularly hard in French, but the late Gilbert Adair managed to translate it into English, under the title A Void.) There was serious intent behind this; it was an echo of the Nazis' efforts to remove every single Jew from Europe. (In the case of Perec's mother, as well as about six million others, they succeeded.) The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is much more light-hearted, but is still the result of an act of literary restriction: an attempt to mimic, in prose, the recursive nature of a flow chart. First published in 1968, this delightfully unclassifiable text, now reissued by Verso, is short and exhausting, and features no capital letters, punctuation (apart from dashes), inverted commas or any other of the normal accoutrements of the printed page. In short, it looks like this: it is never very wise to approach a line manager at a time when his gastric functions are likely to overshadow the professional and managerial capacities associated with his hierarchical rank it is far better to go see him in the morning but what the hell he himself told you to come see him at 2.30 pm you have to take life as it comes so now it is 2.30 pm and you go to see mr x … and so on. I could have stopped anywhere. You can either put up with this kind of thing or you can't, but once you slip into its rhythms, it becomes both beguiling and hilarious (although you wouldn't really want it any longer.) For me it recalls Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, or some of the madder expressions of Beckett's prose works (and Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot); or indeed, Don Marquis's Archy and Mehitabel, a similarly unpunctuated and lower-case text. There's something about this style which is particularly suited to the downtrodden, and in my experience there are few more miserable and downtrodden people than office workers. It first appeared in the journal Enseignement programmé, which was devoted to exploring computer programming (in those days, still in its youth); as it happened, Perec's day job was as a lowly information storage and retrieval technician, grade IIIB, which meant, as Bellos notes in his introduction, 'his prospects of getting a raise were quite as dim as those of the narrator of this tale.' And yet there's a kind of insane but helpless cunning behind his efforts: which day would be best to ask? (None of them, of course.) Look at the cafeteria menu, Perec says. Is fish being served? Then be careful, for your line manager may have swallowed a fish bone and be 'in a really awful mood'. Bellos uses the word 'circumperambulate' to describe the futile odyssey you must make around the building to find out where 'he' is; he seems at times as elusive as Godot himself. When he does call you into his office 'abandon all rancour and refrain from observing [that] … he could have bloody well given you an appointment three weeks ago'. You know the protagonist will exhaust all the possibilities of the flow chart and still not get his raise; it would, of course, destroy the comedy if he did. Even in the 1960s, people were becoming uneasy about the prospect of losing their jobs to computers; Perec's own job was one of the more fragile canaries in that particular coalmine. So this book, although describing a world from over half a century ago, still rings true: not only do we have the eternal dehumanised tedium of the office, which has been evoked ever since offices were invented (think of Dickens's worn-out clerks, or Melville's rebellious Bartleby), but the long shadow of the algorithm. 'It would have been nice,' says Bellos wistfully at one point, 'to translate this text without apostrophes either, which are not needed in French, but that might have tried readers' patience a little too much.' He acknowledges that the text is 'quite unreadable in the ordinary way', and you could say that now that I have given you the gist, I have spared you the task of reading the book yourself. But there is something delightful about its intent, a sympathetic humanity which is deliberately at odds with the relentless, machine-like persistence of the prose. It's a text that repays attention, and is timeless.
The Independent
39 minutes ago
- The Independent
Paris' iconic cauldron from the Olympic Games returns to light up summer nights
A year after it captivated crowds during the Paris Olympics, a centerpiece of the summer Games is making a comeback. The iconic helium-powered balloon that attracted myriads of tourists during the summer Games has shed its Olympic branding and is now just called the 'Paris Cauldron.' It is set to rise again into the air later Saturday, lifting off over the Tuileries Garden. Around 30,000 people are expected to attend the launch, which coincides with France's annual street music festival — the Fete de la Musique, the Paris police prefecture said. And it won't be a one-time event. After Saturday's flight, the balloon will lift off into the sky each summer evening from June 21 to Sept. 14, for the next three years. The cauldron's ascent may become a new rhythm of the Parisian summer, with special flights planned for Bastille Day on July 14 and the anniversary of the 2024 opening ceremony on July 26. Gone is the official 'Olympic' branding — forbidden under IOC reuse rules — but the spectacle remains. The 30-meter (98-foot) -tall floating ring, dreamed up by French designer Mathieu Lehanneur and powered by French energy company EDF, simulates flame without fire: LED lights, mist jets and high-pressure fans create a luminous halo that hovers above the city at dusk, visible from rooftops across the capital. Though it stole the show in 2024, the cauldron was only meant to be temporary, not engineered for multi-year outdoor exposure. To transform it into a summer staple, engineers reinforced it. The aluminum ring and tether points were rebuilt with tougher components to handle rain, sun and temperature changes over several seasons. Though it's a hot-air-balloon-style, the lift comes solely from helium — no flame, no burner, just gas and engineering. The structure first dazzled during the Olympics. Over just 40 days, it drew more than 200,000 visitors, according to officials. Now anchored in the center of the drained Tuileries pond, the cauldron's return is part of French President Emmanuel Macron's effort to preserve the Games' spirit in the city, as Paris looks ahead to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Daily Mirror
an hour ago
- Daily Mirror
Soap stars who flopped in America from shop assistant to one-hit wonder
As Michelle Ryan rejoins EastEnders as gobby Zoe Slater after trying her luck stateside in the axed remake of Bionic Woman, we look at other soap actors from Enders, Corrie, Emmerdale and Hollyoaks who have tried to crack America Soap fans are celebrating the return of Michelle Ryan to EastEnders - back as gobby Zoe Slater after a 20-year gap. She left Walford in 2005 after landing the role of Jaime Sommers in the US remake of Bionic Woman. The show was set to make her a huge US TV star, but sadly the 2007 show was axed after just one series. Michelle, 41, is far from the only British star to be enjoying rebound soap success after following their acting dreams over the pond. Even one Oscar winner realised that home really is where the heart is... READ MORE: Emmerdale star loses 4 stone as lifestyle change reverses major health issue Patsy Palmer, EastEnders Michelle's Albert Square colleague, famous for those yells of "Rickaaay!" as Bianca Butcher, headed to California in 2014 with her husband Richard Merkell and her four children. But her career did not make as much headway out there, according to her IMDB entry, which cites a 2014 TV commercial for Best Buy and a UK short film in 2015, which starred her son Charley Palmer Rothwell, 33. Patsy does have a very glamorous claim to LA fame though. Her son Fenton Merkell, 25, dated supermodel Cindy Crawford's daughter Kaia Gerber, after they met as models. But the allure of Bianca's Puffa jacket has proven too strong. Patsy, 53, has yo-yoed in and out of the BBC soap for years. She returned last year, staying until earlier this year, when she went on Celebrity Big Brother. Rob Kazinsky, EastEnders He played Sean Slater from 2006 until 2009, before landing his big break in vampire series True Blood in 2013, as Macklyn Warlow. Rob, 41, then made the jump to the big screen in Pacific Rim (2013), Warcraft (2016) and Captain Marvel (2019). However it appears after time in the Marvel universe he was yearning for something more down to earth - as he headed back to EastEnders for a brief stint in 2019, and then made two more appearances in 2021 and 2022 Nikki Sanderson, Coronation Street As mouthy hairdresser Candice, she was a favourite on the ITV soap from 1995 to 2005. She tried her hand across the pond, with mixed results. Nikki, 41, did land a role in 2008 horror film Boogeyman 3, PRAISE but it went straight to DVD. Fast forward to 2012 and she joined the cast of Hollyoaks as Maxine Minniver, to great success. She was praised for playing a domestic violence victim in one of the Channel 4 soap's most harrowing storylines. Nikki won the Inside Soap Award for Outstanding Achievement in 2023, before quitting the soap this year. Rachel Shenton, Hollyoaks She starred as Mitzeee Minniver for three years before leaving in 2013. She went on to appear in US series Switched at Birth from 2014 to 2017. The following year she won an Oscar for her short film The Silent Child, based on her own experiences as the child of a parent who became deaf. Rachel, 37, now stars in the family friendly drama All Creatures Great and Small on 5, as James Herriot's love interest. Adele Silva, Emmerdale Aside from a five-year break from 2000, the actress was part of the furniture at the ITV soap - first appearing as Kelly Windsor in 1993 aged 13. She tried to leave Kelly behind in 2007 and moved to the US, but struggled to find acting jobs, and in 2010 she was pictured working in a Ted Baker store in LA. Adele came back to Emmerdale briefly before starring in 2012 comedy horror film Strippers vs Werewolves with Freddy Kruger actor Robert Englund. Bagging more UK acting jobs rather than LA ones, Adele, 44, then headed to Hollyoaks for seven episodes in 2015, playing Leela Lomax's cousin, Angela Brown Joshua Richards, Emmerdale Joshua's career path is pretty unique as, unlike others soap rebounders, he was a Hollywood heavyweight who turned his back on Tinseltown to appear in soapland. More than two decades ago, Josh was starring with Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom and Peter O'Toole in 2004 blockbuster Troy. Josh, 65, also starred in 2017 film King Arthur: Excalibur Rising, before landing the role of Bear Wolf on Emmerdale. It was a dream job, because he was desperate to work in Yorkshire, where he has lived for 30 years "and be home in time for my tea". But he also has some early soap pedigree, after appearing in an episode of Heartbeat back in 1999. And here are some of the homegrown acting talents who became global stars after heading stateside... Idris Elba, Family Affairs His first big break came in the Channel 5 soap in 1997, as Tim Webster, followed by London's Burning in 2001, before trying his luck in the US . Idris, 52, hit the big-time playing Stringer Bell in the iconic cop series The Wire from 2002 to 2004. On the big screen, he has been in American Gangster (2007), Prometheus (2012) and Avengers: Infinity War (2018). Himesh Patel, EastEnders Himesh is one of biggest soap exports, and is now successful film actor since leaving his role as Tamwar Masood in EastEnders from 2007 to 2016. He has appeared in the Beatles inspired 2019 movie Yesterday, Christopher Nolan film Tenet (2020), Don't Look Up (2021), and 2022. film Enola Holmes 2. Himesh, 34, is now filming Enola Holmes 3, as Dr John Watson. Nathalie Emmanuel, Hollyoaks Three years after leaving the Channel 4 soap, as Sasha Valentine, in 2010, she played the major role of Missandei in Game of Thrones until 2019. She then appeared in 2022 horror film The Invitation, Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis last year, and Natalie, 36, also turned up in Fast & Furious seven, eight and nine. Ben Hardy, EastEnders Shortly after leaving his role of Peter Beale, he was cast in 2016 film X-Men: Apocalypse, followed by Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), and Love at First Sight (2023).
