EastEnders star Annette Badland has revealed that her stint on the show led to such horrific death threats that she was placed under “house arrest” for six weeks.
An Olivier-nominated actress with notable television roles on shows such as Bergerac, Doctor Who and Ted Lasso, Badland joined the BBC’s long-running soap in 2014 as Babe Smith.
An antagonist and villain, Babe was involved in a number of dramatic plotlines, with the character getting involved in blackmail, baby farming and encouraging Abi Branning (Lorna Fitzgerald) to fake a pregnancy.
And appearing on Coronation Street star Sally Lindsay’s podcast, Badland, 75, revealed that the public had extreme reactions to her character.
“People think your [character is] real, don’t they?” Lindsay asked Badland, “I don’t think you had a really good experience with that because Babe was such a villainous character.”
Badland left the London-based soap in 2017, and told Lindsay that the writers “racked up my villainy” once she was leaving.
“But I had death threats,” she said. “The call from the BBC security saying, ‘We’re getting death threats’, and they’d worked for the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, so they said, ‘There are red alert code words in this, so we have to take it seriously.’”
“Oh my lord. What happened then?” Lindsay asked, with Badland explaining: “[They said,] ‘Don’t go out, don’t tell people where you’re going. No social media.’”
“They eventually traced it to just outside Liverpool. But it was in a school. They didn’t think it was a child, but because it was a public computer, they didn’t feel they could get much further. And that took about a month to six weeks.”
“So you were under house arrest for six weeks?” Lindsay asked. Badland replied: “They just said, ‘Do not go out. Just don’t go out, and tell people where you’re going if you do go out.’”
Badland’s exit from the soap was announced in 2016 and was met with relief from fans, who overwhelmingly said that they would not miss the character as she was “awful”, according to one poll.
Her final episode saw her calling Linda Carter (Kellie Bright) a “stuck-up cow”, only for her to be thrown out of the pub by Mick (Danny Dyer).
