Former Mrs Brown’s Boys star Gary Hollywood has revealed he gave up a stint on The Bill to take up a job with Brendan O’Carroll on his hit BBC sitcom.
The Scottish star, who played Dino Doyle until he quit the show in 2020, revealed he was offered a six-month contract with the police drama – but turned it down to work with the Dubliner instead.
The 41-year-old said: “I met himself (Brendan) while doing Panto up in the Pavilion in Glasgow and he said what are you doing after this?
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“I’d just left the soap opera (Scottish soap Take The High Road) and I said I’m heading down to London, as I’ve got The Bill, possibly with six months’ work.
“Brendan said 'I’ve written this show and there’s a year’s work' and my children were young at the time, so I thought 'oh a year’s work, let’s go with that' and then twenty years later and we had our ups and downs and needless to say we moved on from that,” he told Nana Akua on GB News.
Gary played the Scottish hairdresser on the show since it was a fledgling stage show in the early Noughties, before it came onto British screens as a sitcom in 2011, but he left in 2020 amid an alleged pay dispute.
Damien McKiernan, who played his boyfriend Rory, was written out of the show at the same time.
But Brendan admitted earlier this year that he misses Gary on the show.
Brendan said: “He was a great actor, and we miss him.
“He used to call me father. He was part of the family, and we haven’t spoken since and haven’t heard a word from him since.”
Brendan admitted the whole episode has left him puzzled and he doesn’t see a way back for the actor — despite his sadness at losing him.
He said: “I think that is it. It was the most bizarre time. I don’t know where it came from. It came out of the blue.
“I got a call from the office to say Gary has been on to the office and wants his flight home to Spain changed to tomorrow.
“I was like ‘But we haven’t been to Glasgow [where the chat show was being filmed] yet? We are meant to be isolating. We haven’t started yet’.
“He said if he’s not going to be in both episodes he’s not going to do it. And then he was gone.”
Gary then went public with claims about pay. Brendan said: “He came back in the press saying he didn’t get paid as much as everyone else. He did.
“In fact, he got more than some because he’d been with us longer.
“He was saying stuff to us about why he was leaving that didn’t exist.”
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