Coronation Street executive producer Iain MacLeod has confirmed that Stephen Reid is set for a "dark" storyline on the soap.
The character - the Canada-born son of Audrey (Sue Nicholls) and half-brother of Gail (Helen Worth) - has been played on and off by Todd Boyce for the last 27 years and recently returned to the cobbles on a permanent basis.
Viewers have begun to suspect that Stephen has an ulterior motive for coming back to Weatherfield as he appears to have significant financial problems and has been desperate for his mother to make him executor of her estate.
"He will continue to get more and more desperate and more and more dark as the story unfolds," MacLeod told press last week.
"The beauty of his character really is that he's got this huge longevity in terms of his connection to the show and to a heritage family, but actually he is a bit of a blank canvas.
"If you think back through his archive scenes, we don't really know a lot about him. So we thought 'well, actually, if we're gonna fill in those blanks and we're gonna learn more about him shouldn't we make him dark, dangerous, interesting and scheming?'"
He added: "I think he's just brought such an injection of otherness into the show, not least his accent! I know on Twitter people are going bananas because they can't get past the fact that he's got a North American accent, but it just makes him feel like this kind of exotic creature that's landed in Weatherfield. You know, he's kind of a fish out of water and doesn't quite belong there, which I think will contribute to some of the behaviours we'll see from him in the coming months and possibly years.
"So all in all, I'm really excited to have him back and viewers are so canny as well, as soon as he arrived everyone was like 'I've got him him marked'. He's going to be a wrong'un, and they will be proved to be right in no small measure. So yeah, I'm excited to see the audience's reaction to the unfolding story when they realise that yes, he's every bit as desperate and dangerous as they predicted when he first returned."
As for whether Audrey will find herself endangered by Stephen, MacLeod continued: "Audrey obviously will be a large part of the story. She won't come to be in any physical jeopardy, I should say. But emotionally, the stakes are incredibly high, because she's put all of her sort of maternal eggs in Stephen's basket.
"She and Gail have always had a very fraught relationship, very complicated relationship. And whereas Stephen, possibly by dint of not having been around, has been put on this pedestal. So yeah, actually, she definitely stands to have her heart broken in a fairly sizeable way across the course of this story.
"I'm excited to see where it goes, Todd is such a brilliant cast member. I love his performance. He's so completely over the moon to be back in this role and back in the show, and is really embracing some of the more dark and dangerous elements of what we're asking him to do. It promises to be a really brilliant story for us."
Coronation Street continues Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on ITV.
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