‘Emmerdale’ star Matthew Wolfenden finds it hard to watch the show’s grooming storyline.
The actor’s character David Metcalfe has no idea his girlfriend Maya Stepney (Louisa Clein) has been grooming teenager Jacob (Joe-Warren Plant) for months, and while the scenes has sparked controversy with complaints made to broadcasting regulator Ofcom, Matthew has defended the soap over the importance of such a serious storyline.
He told the Daily Mail: "A lot of people say I can’t watch it but that’s the point. It’s supposed to be horrible. This stuff happens. It was the right response.
"We wanted to shock people. It was hard for me to watch. My eldest son is eight so it was a really hard watch."
Matthew admitted he finds it tough to emotionally cope with such a mentally taxing storyline, but when he’s away from set he turns to his wife Charley Webb – who plays Debbie Dingle on the show – and their two sons Buster, eight, and Bowie, three.
He added: "When you’re doing a storyline like I’m doing, it’s quite hard to come home and rid your mind of everything you’ve been doing that day.
"It’s so emotional The best thing is being able to come home and be with those kids."
Last month, the loved up couple revealed they are expecting their third child as Charley shared a family photo and simply wrote "#Number3" as the caption.
Matthew previously admitted he wants to have more kids and joked he’d love to have enough to make up a football team.
He said: "I’d have a football team. It’s not me who has to go through all the hard work though. We’re definitely going to go for number three.
"We’d like the age gap to be a lot closer to our youngest. We’ve got five years between the two of them at the moment, so we’d like a bit of a smaller age gap. We’d quite like a girl, but we’ll see. My family are all boys and we’ve got two boys so the odds are we’ll probably have another."
Emmerdale’s Matthew Wolfenden struggled to watch grooming scenes
