Emmerdale spoilers follow.
Emmerdale star Lisa Riley has dropped some tasty spoilers for the soap’s Christmas episodes, with the actor teasing that viewers will get to view a storyline that has “never been done before”.
Riley’s Mandy Dingle has been involved in several major storylines over the years, with a recent arc seeing her husband Paddy struggle to repair the fractured bond that he shared with his father, Bear Wolf.
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After much confrontation, Bear left the Dales earlier this year as he sought a new life elsewhere, though it was soon revealed that it hadn’t gone to plan after he was seen wandering around the area.
Riley, who first played Mandy in 1995, teased earlier this month that Bear’s return would lead to an unprecedented storyline on the soap, and she has now expanded on these comments in an interview held at the 2025 Inside Soap Awards.
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“Vicky Thomas, who directed [the] big ice [limousine] crash, is directing [the] Christmas Day [episode], so that speaks for itself,” she told The Sun, before detailing the storyline involving Bear and Paddy.
“It’s going to straggle over the whole of Christmas and into the New Year – it’s a storyline that’s never been done before,” she said. “When we got the script – we were told months ago – it’s something really exciting.
“That’s [what’s] so good about soaps, we’ve planned loads of things to knock you off kilter. We tackled Paddy’s [mental health] before and that probed people to liken it to what’s happened to Bear.
“Is that the truth? It might be a complete curveball. That’s why we’re lucky with our writers – they’re dropping stuff on purpose to knock you off kilter,” teased the actor, who returned to the ITV soap in 2018 after a 17-year absence.
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Bear’s storyline was announced back in May, with producer Laura Shaw teasing: “The character of Bear, we’ve got a big storyline coming up for him. He’s going to go off screen for a little while, he’s going to go missing.
“And when he comes back, what you’ll see is a very different Bear in a really different situation. We’re all going to be watching and going, ‘What the hell has happened here?’ That’s going to be really exciting.”
