10 Actors Who Refused To Die On Screen
2. Rita Simons - Eastenders
At the start of 2017, Eastenders character Roxy Mitchell (Rita Simons) was killed off when she drowned in a swimming pool along with her sister Ronnie (Samantha Womack) after suffering a heart attack due to a cocaine overdose. Yup.
However, while fans saw Ronnie's body, Roxy's corpse was never shown, and the reason for this?
Rita Simons straight-up refused to play dead, in the hope that doing so might allow her to return to the soap one day. In an interview with The Sun earlier this year, Simons said:
"I got pulled aside a couple of days before filming the final scene by an exec... who said to me, 'There are a lot of people upstairs who don't agree with this'... They said, 'If you want any chance at ever bringing Roxy back, you have to refuse to die.' ... Now is the time to say I played that scene as if I was holding my breath. Go back and watch it online and you will see next to nothing of me at all... I didn’t let anyone film me jump in the pool, so no one saw me drown."
And Simons' sneaky gambit sort-of paid off - she returned to Eastenders earlier this year for a one-off appearance, albeit as a hallucination to Roxy's daughter, Amy (Ellie Dadd).