CORRIE’S Simon Gregson has said his first decade on the soap was “hell”.
He was just 15 when he appeared as Steve McDonald on the show, joining in 1989.
And while Manchester native Simon loves playing the part now, he said “the pros outweigh the cons the older you get and the longer you’ve been in the show”.
On this week’s Living With Lucy, he added: “At the beginning, my character wasn’t very well liked. That reflected in your real life. The first ten years were hell.
“I really don’t know how I got through it. (My son) Alfie is 15 now. If Alfie went through a tenth of what I was going through, I wouldn’t be able to cope with it for him. I really don’t know why I survived, I really honestly don’t.”
He told host Lucy Kennedy: “I used to be a terrible worrier, which affected me massively.
“I went through a time where I was so worried about stuff that I actually started to get a bit of a problem, doubt myself, hate myself, worry about everything.
“It was a problem, took me a while to get out of the situation. But I just suddenly thought to myself, when I’m on my deathbed, am I going to sit there and go, ‘I wish I worried more’ — and it was like an epiphany.”
'LOT OF ABUSE'
Separately, he spoke to Irish podcast Tis Yourself and said that as a young man, he got a lot of abuse from people his own age.
He said: “It’s instant jealousy because they think you’re multi-millionaires, which obviously is not the case. And secondly, they have a preconception.
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“They’re like, ‘He’s off the telly, therefore he’s going to be an arsehole. He’s going to have his head up his backside, he’s going to be a show-off, he’s going to be big-headed and he’s going to think he’s great.’
“So you kind of go out of your way to convince a stranger you’re a normal person and that’s how I spent most of my time doing.
"It’s only into my late-30s I was like, ‘What are you doing? Who cares what they think?’”
Simon may be one of Corrie’s longest-running stars but learned not to say he is “famous”.
He said: “You never want to use the word ‘famous’. I used it once on Twitter and got berated like mad. ‘Who do you think you are using the word famous?’
“It’s the most-watched, longest-running continuing serial drama on the planet. If you can’t use the word famous, what am I supposed to use? Tomato?”
And while Simon has been starring on the cobbles for more than three decades, his mum still warns him about his job.
He laughed: “Every year my mum still says, ‘Don’t rock the boat. You might not be there.’ ‘Mum it’s been 34 years.’
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“Every year she thinks it might be the last time, and you never know, it might be! It takes one producer to go ‘na, don’t like him anymore’.”
- Living with Lucy airs tonight on Virgin Media One at 9pm.
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