Emmerdale star refuses to watch soap after constantly crying on set

star Roxy Shahidi confessed she is unable to watch the scene where her character Leyla Harding tragically dies. Back in February, a limo crash caused by Joe Tate (Ned Porteous) claimed the lives of Leyla, Suzy Merton (Martelle Edinborough) and Amy Wyatt (Natalie Ann Jamieson). In the gut-wrenching scenes, Leyla's son Jacob Gallagher (Joe-Warren Plant) was working at the hospital when several victims were brought in from the crash. After discovering that his mum was one of the people in the ambulance, Jacob frantically rushed around the hospital looking for her.

But in a truly devastating moment, Jacob stumbled across Leyla's lifeless body, with his colleague revealing that she died upon arrival. The doctor explained that Leyla died from "severe blood loss" after she was impaled in the stomach, leaving Jacob utterly devastated. And emotions were clearly heightened off-screen as Roxy, 42, confessed she is yet to watch the heartbreaking scenes. "It's still quite fresh - I haven't actually watched it, I couldn't," the star said, admitting she ended up in tears when she filmed her final scenes alongside Joe.

She explained: "I found it difficult enough filming those scenes. Every time I was on set with Joe I cried. It seems to have really stuck in people's minds - they come up and say, 'I can't believe they've killed you off, that poor boy.'"

Quizzed about her feelings on bidding farewell to the soap after 17 years, Roxy responded: "It was a mix of fear and excitement - of stepping in to the unknown and leaving behind a place that feels like home. It stops just being a job but I'm grateful it was a death rather than an exit because it's done.

Looking to the future, Roxy added: "Life is short, I'm 42, I might have the same years again if I'm lucky and I want to try things, have a diverse range of experiences. Now I've made the leap I feel scared and alive every day."

Although she has left the Dales behind, Roxy is still working closely with her former co-star Matthew Wolfenden, who stepped down from the role of David Metcalfe in 2023. The duo launched their podcast Side Hustles last year, which sees them invite famous guests to spill all about their extra-curricular projects that fans might not know about.

Explaining how their podcast came about, Matthew, 45, said: "Roxy will probably tell you a slightly different story, but the way that I remember is me and Roxy were filming together on location in this house, and it was just me and her all day.

"There's a lot of downtime when they're setting lights up and resetting cameras. We were filming a lot together in Emmerdale because our characters were kind of best buddies and we were spending a lot of time together because we were writing together outside of Emmerdale."

He continued: "We were like, 'what else can we do? Can we do something else?' Let's add another string to our bow. Why don't we try a podcast? So we sat there and brainstormed. We just couldn't come up with something that we could do that was different to anything that we've seen before.

"And then we started talking about the fact that we've always got these side hustles and I was like, 'well, that's perfect - side hustles'. Why don't we speak to people off the TV that have these really interesting side hustles, things people don't know about or might want to know more about."