Emmerdale actor Bhasker Patel said goodbye to his long-running character Rishi Sharma in a shocking instalment from the Dales last night (27 July), leaving fans devastated.

After his stunning exit, which ended a 12 year stint on the smash hit soap, Bhasker appeared on ITV’s Lorraine to speak with guest host, Christine Lampard, where he confirmed the surprise death wasn't his idea. The veteran actor revealed producers informed him they were going to "kill him off".

He said: "Getting a job like this, it was like a godsend, and then when the producer rang me and said, 'we need to talk to you and we're killing him off because we want a big story, and it's going to be a big surprise."

The actor expressed his gratitude to ITV for letting him do "a lot of other work" during his tenure on Emmerdale, and said he felt a "part of ITV". He added: "When the producer said 'we're going to kill you off', I was like, 'okay, that part of my life with this guy, it's over, and I'm going to move on'."

In response, Christine said: "It's brutal though, isn't it? ‘We're going to kill you off’, what a sentence to hear."

Later, the host asked what Bhasker would miss most about his co-star Chris Bisson, who plays his on-screen son Jai Sharma. The 67 year old replied: "He is a cheeky one while filming, he always wants to make me laugh – and he felt that Rishi should be a jovial dad or whatever, so even in serious scenes and serious storylines, he would get kind of a glint, and I would go ‘no please don’t do it [make me laugh]’, so I think that, I will miss."

Reflecting on viewers’ shocked and devastated response to the dramatic twist, Christine reiterated it was "the shock the writers wanted". She then confirmed her mum, an avid Emmerdale viewer, was also "very shocked" by the storyline.

Bhasker’s Rishi Sharma died in a freak accident during Thursday night’s (27 July) instalment. The long-awaited episode finally saw Chris Bisson’s Jai Sharma and Charlotte Bellamy’s Laurel Thomas tie the knot in an intimate church wedding ceremony.

The drama is never far away in the famed village, though. Only hours before Laurel walked down the aisle, with the pair's nearest and dearest in attendance, Rishi and Jai's mum Georgia turned up to try and make amends with the couple.

What happened instead, was a raging argument between Rishi and Jai once more, as the pained father finally admitted his adopted son's real dad was his own brother.

"My brother. He had an affair with Georgia. And he's your real father," he explained to a horrified Jai.

Rishi went on to say the reason he took Jai in as his own son was because the family were so "conservative" and wouldn't have allowed a scandal such as an "affair" to rock them.

"I did the honourable thing. Our family were very conservative. You can't imagine the scandal there would have been," Rishi tried to tell his son, but at the time, Jai was too upset to forgive him.

"It is not good enough. You want to come in that church and pretend to be my dad," Jai raged. "Well then you have to start behaving like one."

As Rishi wished Jai and Laurel a "wonderful day," he asked if his son would show him the "videos" one day, not realising he wouldn't get the opportunity. In a heartbreaking final moment between the pair, Jai declared: "You'll need to live a long time."

Still determined to try and build bridges between the warring father and son, Georgia called Rishi and told him to come to the wedding because she knew Jai would want him there "deep down".

As fans watched Rishi all dressed up in his suit, it seemed the father-son difficulties would finally come to an end, but as Jai delivered his speech and celebrated his marriage, there was still an empty spot where his father should have been.

Sadly, in an awful turn of events, fans were left horrified to see Rishi dead at the bottom of his stairs with his eyes wide open.

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