Dominic Brunt had to read his ‘Emmerdale’ baby loss scripts in private because he kept "bursting into tears".
The 48-year-old actor – who plays Paddy Kirk in the soap – and Lucy Pargeter, 41, are involved in a heart-wrenching plot next week when her character Chas Dingle gives birth to their daughter Grace, who has been diagnosed with bilateral renal agenesis, but she only survives for 20 minutes.
And Dominic found it "impossible" to hold back the tears while he was learning his lines, due to the hard-hitting nature of the content.
He said: "It kept taking us by surprise. We read the script and it was almost impossible to read it without bursting into tears all the time, so I kept reading it in private.
"I thought it was just me being soft, but Lucy said the same.
"Situations where you were holding a real baby who was gurgling in front of you just made it all the more real and all the more emotional."
Dominic and Lucy had to go into a special room to "depressurise" after shooting the emotional scenes, and he admitted they both kept saying how fortunate it is they haven’t had to go through something similar in real life.
He added: "Lucy was so incredibly honest, and natural in what she was doing with this storyline that you couldn’t help be swept along with him.
"When they said ‘cut’ there was a room in the hospital where we were filming, and we had to kind of depressurise and come down from it. We just kept saying, ‘Thank God we’re not actually living this.’
"It was really upsetting, but we were fortunate enough to go through the process that each scene goes through while we’re here.
"It’s like that performance pitch you hit on the word ‘action’ when it’s a take is the one you’re saving it back for really.
"Sometimes you just run it quietly and then you hit it."
Dominic Brunt kept bursting into tears at Emmerdale script
