‘Torvill and Dean’ stars Will Tudor and Poppy Lee Friar were taught enough "to be comfortable" on the ice.
The pair are appearing in the new ITV drama about skating legends Christopher Dean and Jayne Torvill, and while they trained for two hours a day for a few weeks they used "doubles" for many of the big moments.
Speaking on ITV’s ‘This Morning’, Will said: "We [are] able to go backwards but we don’t show that in the actual movie.
"The idea was that we’d be comfortable enough on the ice so that we could do the scenes on the ice and that would be fine. But we did have doubles."
He insisted they "did do bits of routines", which follows the previous decision from programme bosses to not allow them to perform the film’s climatic dance.
Torvill and Dean competed in the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo and made history by scoring 12 perfect sixes from the judges.
The triumphant pair became the highest-scoring performers of all time after skating to Maurice Ravel’s ‘Bolero’, and their performance was watched by a British television audience of more than 24 million people.
Executive producer Emily Dalton recently said: "We hope people don’t feel robbed. But anyone who has seen anyone do the dance will know no one can do it like them."
Despite the pressures surrounding the drama – set to air on Christmas Day (25.12.18) at 9.15pm on ITV – Poppy has now revealed they were able to get in the right frame of mind as actors.
She said: "When we’re doing our scenes we’re really just thinking about our characters and scenes, and less about the reality that we’re playing these icons."
Torvill and Dean stars had skating crash course
