Emmerdale spoilers follow.
Emmerdale star Mark Charnock has spoken about his character Marlon Dingle’s involvement in next week’s flashback episodes, as the normally mild-mannered chef flies into a rage.
The week will be dedicated to showing what happens in the time leading up to Ray Walters’ murder, from the perspectives of multiple villagers, and once the killer is revealed, we’ll see the aftermath and how the body ended up in Jai Sharma’s vehicle.
Marlon has been worried about April Windsor all year after she ran away from home, and was then roped into Ray and Celia Daniels’ drug dealing and human trafficking scheme.
Flashback week will show us that it becomes too much for Marlon, and he grabs a knife to go and sort Ray out for good. But is he really the one who kills Ray?
Charnock obviously isn’t giving the game away, but he has delved into his character’s mindset, stating: “I think he has lost all hope, he’s got to the point where only the worst kind of thing he could possibly do, like murder, is the only answer.
“He’s tried everything else. There are no options left to him. He’s just hit one way street, after one way street. He can’t even reverse out of it anymore. And he just needs to smash through the wall, he feels he has to resort to the worst thing any person can.”
“He’s been sort of reduced into this sort of single-celled attitude where he can’t see anything else,” the actor continued. “He’s had this blindfold put on him and all that’s left of this tiny slit in this, and all he can see is ending Ray.
“He can’t see any other option, but killing him. And that’s mixed in with just the logic of it, ‘if I get rid of him, maybe he’ll stop’. But also, the rage he feels of what this man has forced upon his daughter.”
He added that Marlon will express “disbelief more than anything” upon learning that Ray is dead, although he teased that may just be the attitude Marlon puts out there to cover his tracks…
Whether Marlon is the killer or not, Charnock stated that it will take a long time for the family to move on from the trauma Ray and Celia inflicted upon them.
“I don’t know how you shed something like this without it hanging over for a long time,” he said. “They’d been living on tenterhooks and expecting the worst hour by hour, day by day, for months. I don’t think it’s gonna be something they shake straight away.”
