Casualty casts Death In Paradise star with touching family connection to the NHS

Death In Paradise and EastEnders star Kellie Shirley is a new face in Holby ED as Casualty begins a new storyline called Storm Damage. With her long and impressive CV she is a familiar face on screens, however, she also has her own real-life experience of working for the NHS which she can bring to the role of Psych Liaison Nurse Sophia Peters.

Speaking exclusively to Express.co.uk she detailed how she and her family have a long connection to the NHS. "My mum worked for the NHS for 30 years," she revealed. "My grandma worked to the end for the NHS. My mother-in-law worked for the NHS...

"It feels like a really perfect fit to play a part that I can bring a tiny bit of authenticity to. And also, in between acting jobs, I worked at King's in London and Lewisham hospital neuro wards, and so I could try to feed in a little bit of my work downtime as an actor so that's been quite nice," she said of her new role.

While fans will only get to meet her character for the first time this coming Saturday (June 15) Kellie has been working on the show for quite a while now. She has had to keep her casting secret but admits she did tell one or two people to get their help with the role.

"I tell my mum everything and also because she works as a nurse herself, I have a few times gone to her with some words in the script [asking] 'mum, how do I say this? What does this mean? What happened?'

"She's kind of been a bit like a mentor to me I suppose, and I wanted to get authenticity as much as possible because it's really important for me to do research and look like I'm doing the job that I'm actually doing and that I don't look out of my depth.

"There's also a mum at school called Emily, who I works as a psychiatric liaison nurse, and so I've been asking her bits about the story and just checking if I'm doing things right.

"So she's been really good to bounce things off of as well. So basically, my mum, my husband, my twins and Emily - that's the only people that knew [I was cast]."

Nurse Sophia is set to clash with fan favourite Dylan Keogh (William Beck) upon her arrival in the ED which begs the question how does she think his fandom will react to her character?

"I mean, obviously that whenever you play a role, you don't think about the fans. You just think about what you're [doing] in the moment. But it will be interesting that now you flag he's got these super fans, maybe my name will be mud. I don't know," she laughs. "They get off on the wrong foot basically," she teased.

With an extensive CV Kellie is a well known face on screens. She played Carly Wicks in EastEnders from 2006 until 2012 and played Kirsty in Sky One’s award winning comedy series In The Long Run which was created by Idris Elba. Death In Paradise fans will also recognise her for playing a drug smuggler called Pamela Bellman in season 10 of the Caribbean set police procedurial.

Kellie has nothing but fond memories of working on the show and intimated that many of the crew are now working on Casualty wihich was a happy surprise. "I was really lucky, because we filmed it during lockdown, so when everyone was having a bit of a time of it here [in the UK] and being in their homes for months on end, I got the golden ticket to go to Guadalupe," she recalled.

"I was there for longer than I was meant to be because of lockdown and travel restrictions and part of it was a little bit of a holiday, which it sounds terrible, but it was [due to travel].

"And loads of the crew on Death In Paradise are working on Casualty, so that was nice. When I started, I knew the DOP and I knew some of the makeup I knew some, some of the runners - because they all worked on Death In Paradise. And so it was just great when I started [on Casualty] because I knew people, and it was lovely. And we had that shorthand because we'd been drinking cocktails on the beach," she laughed.

Casualty is on BBC One on Saturday nights with previous versions available on BBC iPlayer. This week (Saturday June 15) Casualty will move to BBC Two for one night only.