British TV legend Ross Kemp: "Nothing I've done fills me with fear more than EastEnders"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Ross Kemp insists he’s not “any sort of a hard man, really”. And, of course, you can’t help but smile, because the very act of hearing him say it triggers a mental slideshow of moments that suggest otherwise. Long-time Kemp watchers will have their own favourites. Perhaps the episodes of his Extreme World documentary that saw him dodging sniper fire in Afghanistan and Syria. Or the time he was in Colombia reporting on the drug trade there only to be stopped in his car by a man with a knife looking for a bribe. And what did Kemp do? “I told him to f**k off.”

The list goes on. How about the time he was told to get down on his knees by armed guerrillas in Papua New Guinea and, instead, he reached for one of their gun barrels and said, “You’re not going to kill me.” Fans of Kemp’s 2023 memoir Take Nothing for Granted may also recall the story of the night he drunkenly went swimming in crocodile-infested waters in Australia and, with almost no recall of what he’d done, was told the next day that he challenged any crocs nearby to “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”.

So, when Kemp claims that “nothing I’ve done fills me with fear more than EastEnders,” it’s hard to judge your reaction. But he really isn’t joking. Thirty-six years since Grant and Phil Mitchell (Steve McFadden) first stepped onto Albert Square, Kemp says, “EastEnders is still the one that pushes me the most.” And his latest return to Walford has been no exception.

Next week, we’ll see Grant return from Portugal as he finally comes face to face with his estranged son, Mark – their first encounter since Mark discovered who his biological father is. Coming after Grant’s flying visit to the Square for the show’s 40th anniversary last year, he’s due to stick around considerably longer, this time as he comes to terms with the deterioration of the Mitchell brothers’ dementia-stricken school-friend Nigel Bates, played by Paul Bradley.

Between sips of botanical lemonade in a north London café, Kemp says he didn’t need to have his arm twisted on this occasion. The challenges of playing Grant as a 61-year-old, “with all the life you’ve experienced in the intervening years”, were what sealed the deal.

“I think Steve [McFadden] is still brilliant when it comes to playing a guy who could hit you with a piece of wood, but could also break down in tears. Which is something you can also say for Grant.” For Kemp, the fear set in when he read his first scenes and realised what lay in store for him. “You get up so early to get to set, and then at the top of the first page, it says, ‘Grant heaves with tears on seeing Nigel.’”

What Kemp couldn’t have foreseen on the first week of shooting was that he’d be shuttling between a hospital set and an actual hospital. “I won’t go into detail, but something happened to my mum on the third day on set. And so heaving tears wasn’t difficult. I was like, ‘Cut! We’ve got that.’ And it’s still not even 8am.

“Then we walk into another set where everybody is having a sort of wake. In the script, there’s a conversation about what a good dancer Nigel was as a lad. I say, ‘You should have seen him in 1977, pogoing in all the clubs.’ Then someone goes, ‘What’s a pogo?’ And suddenly everyone’s chanting, ‘GRANT! GRANT! GRANT!’ trying to get me to pogo. There I am, pogoing at the tender age of 61. And there’s not much pogoing left in these knees.”

The more time you spend with Kemp, the more you realise that it’s not the shadow of Grant Mitchell that looms over him; it’s that of his father John, a former serviceman and life-long policeman – who, in a Facebook post announcing his death last year, he described as “my hero; my role model”.

In Lost Boys, Deadly Men, Kemp’s recent exploration into the crisis in masculinity affecting young men, he entered a male-only retreat called The Unmasked Man, where he was encouraged to open up to strangers and reveal the one thing he wanted to hear from his father. His answer? “It’s not always about competition.”

But what sort of a career would he have without that competitive streak? I’m reminded of the scene from a previous return to Albert Square, in which he tells his daughter Courtney, “Perhaps if I’d been a better dad, you wouldn’t be the person you are.” Whose emotions are we watching in moments like that? Is it Grant – or is it Ross, rationalising what his father wasn’t always able to give him?

“Oh, you definitely draw from real life,” he says, “unless you use a tear stick, that’s the only way.”

While Kemp seemed to take away a lot of positives from his time at the retreat, one thing that sticks in his mind was “transformational coach” Alexander Cottle’s description of the Mitchell brothers as “stereotypical alpha males”.

He’s not sure that’s entirely fair – and back in 1994, if you were one of the 25 million people who saw Grant tearfully confront his wife Sharon in a packed Queen Vic over her affair with Phil, you won’t need Ross Kemp to remind you that, “we were bawling our eyes out 30 years ago. We were doing it long before people suddenly thought, ‘Oh, it’s ground-breaking drama.’”

In the event, it’s been quite handy sharing a body with Grant Mitchell. It’s allowed him to lean into the stereotype not just when it suits him, but also to surprise those who dare question his range. Former EastEnders script editor and screenwriter John Yorke is on hand to bear testament to the full breadth of that range. He gleefully recalls their first encounter back in 1994 when Kemp, “just about the biggest star in Britain at that point, walks into my office and says, ‘I want to complain.’ I replied, ‘How can I help?’ He prodded me in the chest and said, ‘I haven’t hit anyone in over a month!’

When this encounter is relayed to Kemp, he hoots with delight and, within seconds, pivots from outright denial to admitting, “Yeah, I think I probably could have done that! Steve and I got on well with a number of the writers. We had things in common – be it a sense of humour, or a view of the world that was similar. Not all of the cast members had that same relationship, and that certainly didn’t harm our storylines! But also, if you’re given a storyline, you can throw it down the toilet or you can charge it up the hill: it’s up to you.”

By contrast, in 1998, when Yorke left the soap and set about casting the role of a gangster who moonlights as drag queen Dilly Dally in the ITV cop show City Central, there was only one name on his list: “Ross was literally in costume the whole time,” remembers Yorke, “and he just loved it. He was playing to the extras all day – a natural born drag queen!”

Kemp rocks forward on his chair. “Shall I tell you a story about that? There was a song I had to do in that role – I Will Survive. And at the time, I’m living in Essex. I’m due to meet the guys down the pub, but first I’ve got just enough time to rehearse ahead of the next day’s shoot. So I’m wearing my neoprene bottoms and I put the little heels on because you have to be able to walk convincingly in stilettos – and I’m holding the hairbrush and belting out I Will Survive. When I’m satisfied with it, I head off to the pub. Next thing you know, slow handclaps. Three of the neighbours had been watching out the window.”

When talk turns to regrets, I’m struck by his candour. He winces as he reflects upon how insecure he felt throughout his 20s: “I was a bit of a w****r, to be honest with you.” He shares a story about starring in Dick Whittington alongside Rod Hull and Emu. “I wouldn’t let him goose me. And he was very upset about that,” says Kemp, now laughing at the absurdity of what he’s about to describe. “That’s the difference between the old Ross Kemp and the new one. He could goose me now. Do you know what else has stayed with me? I was in the dressing room next door to Rod and even when he was out, if Emu was asleep, you had to be quiet!”

Happily, the span of Kemp’s personal growth extends beyond personal space issues around sock puppets. In the 2000s, his marriage to former Sun and News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks (then Wade) launched him into circles he couldn’t have imagined as a boy growing up in Barking, “just to the right of the EastEnders map”. He had dinner in Chequers with two prime ministers – Tony Blair and David Cameron – but neither impressed him as much as the American dignitaries he met at that time: the “natural magnetism” of Bill Clinton and the “powerful calm” of war hero turned Republican Presidential nominee John McCain: “He was the most impressive for me, just because he was shot down over Vietnam [where he was imprisoned for five years]. I thought he was just an incredibly stoic individual.”

The interest in politics awakened in Kemp by his marriage to Brooks has outlasted it. After their divorce in 2009, he campaigned for Gordon Brown before, in 2024, issuing a surprising endorsement for Conservative MP Mark Francois – on the basis of his work with Armed Forces veterans. In 2012, Kemp’s time spent in Hugo Chávez’s “socialist utopia” of Venezuela was a dramatic eye-opener. In the resulting documentary, we saw Kemp’s visible shock as he visited a hospital whose staff simply couldn’t work fast enough to triage the victims of shootings arriving every few minutes at Caracas’s infamous El Helicoide jail, which had been run by its own inmates for the previous five years.

As revealing as Kemp’s trips to the world’s most fractious hot spots are, one thing he withholds from viewers is the effect that these trips have on him. In the past, he’s said that his experiences following troops fighting in the Helmand province in Afghanistan left him “self-medicating”.

Not just Afghanistan – his final day in El Helicoide affected him so profoundly that his time there climaxed in a messy night on Johnnie Walker that saw him smash several of his teeth. It doesn’t look like he’ll be leaving a Tripadvisor review for the dentist who treated him any time soon. “It was my first time on whisky and I managed to fall out with the people around me. The next day, they had to wake up the local dentist on her day off and try and stick something on me that would pass as teeth for the rest of the filming. She went at me with a chisel, no anaesthetic. The pain was awful, but the humiliation was worse.”

This, being 2012, was also the year Kemp met his current wife, corporate lawyer Renee O’Brien – and, should he ever get the call, the story of how they met is surely one he can use on Would I Lie to You?

In Afghanistan, he learnt that one issue faced by some soldiers was that the conditions there caused their underwear to “rot on them as they got soaked in ditches in 40 degree heat”. Leaning on the contacts he had, he pitched an idea for underpants containing silver (for its antibacterial properties) to his friend Bobby who worked for the luxury lingerie brand Agent Provocateur. The pants never happened but Bobby did tell him about his friend Renee, with whom he thought Kemp might hit it off. For Kemp, one of the big draws from the outset was the fact that O’Brien “hadn’t seen a single thing I was in”.

Fourteen years after that first blind date in a Marylebone private members’ club, Kemp says that O’Brien still hasn’t seen any of his TV work. “That’s definitely part of the attraction!” he laughs. “In terms of what you see on paper, we’re probably incompatible. And yet…”

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And yet the pair went on to have three children: Leo (10) and eight- year-old twins Ava and Kitty, in addition to Oliver, Kemp’s 15-year-old son from a prior relationship with make-up artist Nicola Coleman. Childcare is shared between them. Yesterday it was Kemp’s turn and his account of the day has the feel of one of his front-line reports.

“With it being Easter, they’re off school so I was being a taxi for most of the day, taking them to different clubs and things. Then it was cooking dinner. One wanted a bit of barbecue, but his sister wanted to have something cooked in the oven – so I was trying to juggle two meals while they were fighting over who was on the trampoline and who was pushing who. Also the dog wanted feeding and… You know, these are very simple things, but often a day in the field can be easier because all you’ve got to look after is yourself as opposed to three children under the age of 11. And no one was satisfied at the end of it!”

Except that, having reached a point in his career that allows him to pivot between drama, documentaries and his BBC One game show Bridge of Lies, Kemp says, “Life is about as good as it can be right now.” He can recall the occasion he was running from sniper fire in Karachi and a woman in a tuk-tuk shouted, “Oi! Are you Grant Mitchell?” in a Brummie accent – but at the same time, he’s also tickled when I tell him that my Gen Z daughters only know him through YouTube clips from Extreme World.

He insists that “there’s never been a strategy to any of this, so I don’t see any reason to start now.” Beyond this current spell in EastEnders, the only plan to which he’s committed to is a trip aboard Steve McFadden’s 72ft-long fishing boat with McFadden and Paul Bradley – “sort of a three-men-in-a-boat type of thing”, he explains. “We’ll go off down the Thames and end up having a nice dinner together, which is what gentlemen of our age should be doing.” And is there room for a new documentary series to boot? “I think there should be!” Watch this space.
Photography: Nicky Johnston @nickyjohnston
Grooming: Bryony Blake @bryony_blake
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