Emmerdale star Kelvin Fletcher has opened up about the 'life-changing' decision to abandon plans to move to America after Covid visa delays derailed his Hollywood dream.
Speaking on a repeat episode of James Martin's cookery show, Kelvin and his wife Liz revealed that their current farming life was never part of the original plan. The couple had intended to relocate to the US, but the pandemic put a stop to their ambitions.
From Hollywood to the Peak District
When James Martin congratulated the couple on their new series, Kelvin said: 'The back end of last year, we finished series three, and then we're already straight on with series four, so that's coming out very soon.'
James joked: 'So you can't really complain about it because it was your idea to do the filming in the first place.'
Kelvin responded: 'We just kind of thought, it's hopefully of interest. It's interesting to us and our journey into farming and to this new life, and then, we kind of pitched the idea, and thankfully, ITV thought it was a good idea, too, and four series later, we're still doing it.'
The Visa Delay That Changed Everything
Turning to their abandoned American dream, James said: 'Just to recap, the reason why you got the farm in the first place was no reason whatsoever. You were originally going to go to America. This was a life-changing thing you decided, and you got the visas and everything, didn't you?'
Liz added: 'As two actors, we thought, you know, Kelvin had been in Emmerdale for 20 years, and we kind of wanted to try something different, and as two actors, we thought, 'Well, why not? Let's go to Hollywood and LA and see what happens'.
'And we only had two children at the time, but unfortunately, Covid stopped that, and they actually stopped the visas. We never got the visas completed because they said, 'There'll be a pause on this for at least two years'.
'But we'd mentally moved on, hadn't we? We sold the house, and we were like, 'Well, what are we going to do now?' And that's when we saw the farm, and it's literally that that sprung the idea.'
Life Imitates Art
Despite playing a farmer on Emmerdale for two decades, Kelvin admitted he and his wife had no real farming experience. 'That's the irony, James, is that I was playing a farmer for 20 years, but as you'll know, with soaps, we did very little farming,' he explained.
'It was more, I think, shooting people with shotguns, going to prison, getting married three or four times. That I was more accustomed to, but when you think of it like that, it sounds crazy, but kind of life has imitated art, and that's a little bit of what people used to say, there's an obvious connection there.'
Kelvin continued: 'You know, as Liz said, we'd had this dream of going to America. It didn't kind of pan out. And from Los Angeles to the Peak District, it's probably not an obvious connection.'
James Martin's Saturday Morning is available to watch on ITVX.
