Eternal love
ITVX comedy-drama Significant Other marks the latest on-screen role for Kéllé Bryan, who tells DQ how she has moved from chart-topping Eternal singer to television actor.
For music lovers of a certain age, Kéllé Bryan will be most recognisable as one-quarter of pop group Eternal. Formed with sisters Easther and Vernie Bennett and Louise Nurding (now Redknapp), the group sold more than 10 million records worldwide across a near-decade-long career that was largely spent as a trio after Redknapp left before the launch of their second album.
Their most notable hit was I Wanna Be the Only One, a duet with BeBe Winans that rose to the top of the UK charts in 1997.
More recently, however, Bryan has become a familiar face on British television after launching her acting career in the wake of Eternal’s break-up at the end of the 1990s. She co-starred in BBC sitcom Me & Mrs Jones and children’s foster care series Rockets Island, before landing a regular role in Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks.
She’s now on screen in Significant Other, ITVX’s “anti-romcom” comedy-drama about two lonely neighbours, Sam (Youssef Kerkour) and Anna (Katherine Parkinson), who struggle to realise the love they are looking for might be right in front of them.
Bryan plays Shelley, Sam’s forthright and determined estranged wife who is left to pick up the pieces of their marriage when Sam ups and leaves her just as she’s returning to work after raising their children. Through the series, she continually brushes off his attempts at a reunion, while Sam is increasingly drawn towards Anna.
Speaking to DQ on set during filming of the eight-part series in Manchester, Bryan says there’s no “weak link” among the cast, which also includes Mark Heap, Sue Vincent, Ben Bailey Smith, Shaun Williamson, Olivia Poulet and Will Ash.
“It’s just lovely. Everyone’s really nice. And that sounds really cliché, but everyone’s lovely to work with,” she says. “Youssef and Katherine are amazing as human beings and as performers and actors. I can really see their skills, not just the dramatic side but the creative side too.”
Shelley, Bryan says, had built a blossoming business career until she and Sam, who had been married for 14 years, decided to have children. She then put her career on hold to raise them – but after she decides it’s time to return to work, he comes home one day and tells her he’s leaving.
“That to her is shocking and stuns her,” the actor continues. “This wasn’t part of the plan. She’s sacrificed her life for her family. And now he’s going off? There’s no sacrifice for him to make. And so she’s in that place where she’s in shock that he’s been able to do this.
“She knows who she married. He’s a bit of an oaf, and incredibly untidy, but as married couples do, you deal with that because you love the person and you want to keep the family together. But this is not what she was expecting at this point in her life. So she’s dealing with the shock and she’s got to keep some normality in the family home. He’s made this mess, but she’s still cleaning it up.”
Through the series, Shelley must face up to Sam’s “childish outbursts,” including showing up at her place of work and following her to the gym. But despite his attempts at reconciliation, she remains stoic and battles on.
“There’s a lot that Shelley has been through that I’ve been through in my past, so it’s triggering in so many different ways,” Bryan admits. “We shot a scene where he is purposely introducing me to Anna as his new girlfriend when she’s not, but he’s trying to make it seem like she is. And lots of women have been in that situation. What I think is really lovely about the writing in this is that Shelley and Anna are not against each other at all. It’s not Anna’s fault that Sam’s brought her into the situation. It’s lovely little nuances like that, which make things different from the usual picture.”
Buying into the “anti-romcom” label Significant Other has adopted, Bryan says much of the humour in the show comes from the situations the characters find themselves in – an approach she believes will also make it relatable to viewers at home.
“You’ve been in those situations, and that is what’s funny. You stumble across the comedy while you’re enjoying a really good narrative and a good story that you can empathise with, and then you find it’s just really funny. I give the credit to the writers and Youssef, in terms of his performance, which is just outstanding. I haven’t actually met a talent like Youssef in a very long time.”
Bryan and Kerkour did a lot of extra prep together before filming began in order to build the familiarity that comes with being in a long marriage. They would talk about their characters’ relationship, how they met and what he first thought of her.
“He was like, ‘I’m punching,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, I hear you!’” she jokes. “Shelley fell in love with Sam’s vigor for life, his carefreeness to just go, ‘Oh, we’ll just do that and just see what happens.’ So we get we did spend a lot of time prepping and studying and also getting the cultural representation side of things right.”
But will viewers be supporting Shelley’s stance in pushing on with her life rather than reuniting with Sam?
“We’ve really thought about that, too, and I think the audience know what he’s like, just because he’s such an oaf,” she says. “You just kind of go, ‘Oh, what are you doing with him? Are you nuts?’ People will be proud of her for getting on with her life, for trying to be a good parent. They’ll get it. They’ll be like, ‘Mate, move on. He’s had two on the side before you’ve even got to the divorce court.’ I think they’ll be proud of her for getting on with it.”
While it might seem like Bryan’s career has taken a new turn after being in a pop group, she was in fact an actor before she became a singer. Eternal, she says, became “much bigger than anyone expected.”
“I was just thinking we were going to have a little bit of fun for about six months and then go away,” she remembers. “They just offered me some money and I was going to be singing and dancing with my best mate, Louise. That’s what I thought it would be. I had no idea we were going to be as huge as we were.”
When Eternal ended, Bryan says the chance to return to acting was a “gift,” although it has been difficult to shake people’s memories of her former career.
“Acting is something I’ve always done, and telling truthful stories is what I’ve always been passionate about. But to get everybody else on that same page has been really hard,” she says. Initially, she spent a lot of time in theatre productions and would refuse to do press interviews to preview the shows she was in because she wanted to surprise people once they saw the show.
“I really wanted to prove myself as an actor,” she says. “It was a very difficult process for people to accept you as something other than what they want to see you as. But I was very happy to take the long route because I wanted to earn people’s respect.”
Bryan’s recurring role on Hollyoaks saw her appear in almost 250 episodes as Martine Westwood between 2018 and 2022, but she says it was never her plan to become a mainstay on the show.
“For me, soap actors sometimes don’t get enough credit. But it was always my agenda to come in, work for a term and then move on, because I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do and what I wanted to do next,” she explains. “But Hollyoaks was the perfect place for me. It’s like a university. It’s like going in and studying really hard for three years. Do your time, get your graduation award and off you go. It’s like that because I can work anywhere now.”
Bryan’s acting career has now taken her from an out-and-out sitcom in Me & Mrs Jones to a more nuanced style of comedy in Significant Other. But she’s also buoyed by the increasing diversity in front of and behind the camera in British television.
“Now black artists and black actors are becoming more and more significant and they have more of a voice,” she says. “Writers are also writing in a more colour-blind fashion – or even not colour-blind and going specifically, ‘This is what it needs to be. This is what I want it to look like.’ We have come a long way.”
tagged in: ITV, ITVX, Kéllé Bryan, Significant Other