Emmerdale’s Bear Wolf actor breaks silence on ‘frightening’ new storyline

Emmerdale’s Bear Wolf has sparked concern with his disappearance on the ITV soap

Emmerdale’s Bear Wolf actor Joshua Richards has broken his silence on his character’s new ‘frightening’ storyline.

Bear was last seen travelling off in his hire car over three months ago. However, in recent scenes, Bear’s son, Paddy Kirk, played by Dominic Brunt, realised his father wasn’t safe in Ireland as he thought but was in fact missing after a long summer of absence.

With Bear’s mental state in question, Paddy is worried for his father’s safety and guilty that they parted on bad terms as he searches for answers with wife Mandy Dingle, played by Lisa Riley.

Talking about the upcoming scenes, Bear actor Joshua said of his new storyline, where it involves modern slavery: “Well, I found it a bit disconcerting really. I found it a bit frightening and also what experience do I have to bring to the table…

“So it was a bit discombobulating at first because I thought it could be interesting because of course Bear has been experiencing this kind of depression and confusion.

“So maybe it’s a great thing to find him so vulnerable, a big strong man being vulnerable and being exploited.

“So as an actor, you just think lovely, lovely, jubbly, jubbly and rub my hands together and then pull my sleeves up to get stuck in.”

Joshua added: “It’ll be a standalone episode where we’ll have some kind of explanation of what exactly happened to him after he got in his car and drove away.

“We did see a few weeks after he’d left the village that he was still with his car and not with his friend Nasha in Ireland at all. So we will find out exactly what happened to him.”

Talking about preparing for the scenes, Joshua said: “I was told a few months ago, told by Laura [Shaw] our producer, that I’d be off screen for a while, that I will disappear.

“I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll get my P45 now and off I go.’ But no, they said, you’ll be coming back.

“But in the meantime, Clare Golds, makeup, said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t cut your hair and don’t shave your beard. Go raggedy.’ So I became a raggedy old man while I was off.”

He added: “You first see Bear when he’s at the real bottom, looking really filthy and scraggly, very scraggly and unkempt. And then bit by bit, we took it away.

“As you can see, I’m almost back to where I was before. But it’s been a very complicated way of portraying various stages in Bear’s journey.”

Emmerdale continues on weekdays at 7.30pm on ITV and ITV X.