Former Coronation Street actress Stephanie Davis has revealed the stomach-churning moment she discovered a caterpillar in her salad while filming a scene for the ITV soap.
Davis, who played Courtney Vance on Coronation Street and Sinead O'Connor on Hollyoaks, explained that actors must carefully track every mouthful they eat during multiple takes to maintain continuity on screen.
Acting and eating challenges
Speaking exclusively to Daily Star in collaboration with WhichBingo, Davis said: "One take, I had to pretend I was eating, because obviously when you're eating on screen you are actually eating the food, but as an actress you don't want to eat too much of it."
She elaborated: "What the viewer at home doesn't know is that in one scene there's the group shot, the wide shot, my single, whoever else's single, a two-shot, a cutaway... you're doing the same scene over and over again."
"And every time you're doing it, if I ate a bit of food on a certain line, I'd have to remember that I ate the food when I said 'sorry', so I'd be like, sorry, eat. I had to remember my food as well."
The caterpillar incident
Davis said she had already learned the hard way not to overeat during filming after becoming ill from a previous scene.
"So in this one scene I had a salad, and I was trying not to eat too much of it, because the week before I'd done it with cookies and I threw up afterwards. I was that ill!" she recalled.
"So I thought, I'm not really eating it, but I'll have one big bite of this salad."
That decision quickly backfired. "And as I was filming, I was putting the salad in my mouth and there was a big caterpillar on it, and I freaked," she said.
"In my head I thought, if I've just eaten loads of caterpillars... honestly, I felt sick."
Other on-set mishaps
Fortunately, the creepy-crawly incident wasn't the only memorable mishap from her years on set.
"And then there have been things where I've fallen over, or a wasp has attacked me," Davis laughed. "I've been attacked by wasps numerous times. There have been loads. I couldn't even think of them all off the top of my head."
