Coronation Street’s Dev Alahan (Jimmi Harkishin) is set to have his world ‘turned upside down’ as he faces the horror news that Asha has been found with drugs after drinking and may have tried to take her own life.
Recent scenes have shown Asha (Tanisha Gorey) struggle with work having suffered horrific racist abuse, and life having lost her twin brother Aadi who departed to live and work in India.
Events take a troubling turn next week as Bernie (Jane Hazlegrove) expresses concern about Asha.
In the shop, an exhausted Asha swigs on a bottle of wine, before suddenly instructing Brody to mind the shop and heading out. As Brody panics, Asha heads down the street in tears.
Back at the pub, Dev takes a call from Amy (who’s found Asha thanks to Theo) and races out. A paramedic tends to Asha and quizzes Dev and Amy as to whether she might have taken any drugs in addition to the wine. As a fraught Dev waits for news in A&E, Sienna approaches and tentatively reveals that they found drugs on Asha. Dev reels as Bernie asks if Asha tried to kill herself.
‘He gets a call from Amy, and suddenly his whole world turns upside down, and that’s when he starts going into denial mode, and says, ‘No, this is going to be fine.’ I remember the emotion being that he just does not want to face that. He doesn’t want to hear that word’.
Asked how Dev is feeling throughout, Jimmi admits, ‘That sense of impotence, that sense of not being able to change, not being able to see it coming, and not being able to fix it.’
‘I think he’s berating himself more than anybody there, and it comes out because we always do that, don’t we? We only show our true emotions to the people that are closest to us because it’s just easier to do it that way. Dev goes and takes out all his frustrations, his anger, his self-doubt, and recriminations with Bernie.’
‘But when he goes back to the hospital, he’s very, very gentle with his daughter, caring and apologetic, and then he walks out there, and then he’s angry and he’s crying, and then he goes back to the hospital, and his daughter never sees any of that. There’s a massive mask that just keeps slipping as soon as he leaves her.’
Jimmi has nothing but praise for his costar, admitting, ‘She’s incredible, really. Instinctively, what she’s done is just wonderful, and I always feel really safe with her. I think she’s amazing. I don’t know how she’s learned it, maybe by osmosis or by just being on Coronation Street for as long as she has, just soaking up all the influences. But she’s very, very, very capable. She’s very confident. And she just feels like my daughter; it doesn’t feel like it’s an actress playing my daughter. She just feels a part of the family.’
And if he will rely on Bernie in the aftermath of these events, Jimmi shared that ‘She’s a voice of reason.’ She’s the only one that he can actually cry in front of. He couldn’t possibly do that with his daughter. It just won’t happen; it won’t come out. I think that’s a mark of a good relationship, when you can actually just be yourself and allow yourself to have those things that are not always easy to look at. They’re not always easy to see as someone’s husband or wife, but Dev was very aware that Bernie was his safety valve.