Ever since Charity Dingle (Emma Atkins) killed nasty gangster Damon ‘Harry’ Harris (Robert Beck) in a violent showdown in Emmerdale, we’ve seen her struggling to cope with the guilt and trauma of having been responsible for taking someone’s life – even someone as vile and dangerous as Harry.
Emma Atkins told us how Charity has been feeling since Harry died.
‘It’s the constant reliving of that moment, so despite the fact she did it to save Mackenzie (Lawrence Robb), she’s never ever been in that situation before. She’s never had a gun in her hand.
‘It’s such close contact as well that I think it’s just so utterly traumatic and beyond anyone’s comprehension. I think it troubles her to the point where she can’t really relate to anyone.’
What lies ahead for Charity?
These feelings only get worse over time, Emma explained. ‘She’s constantly reliving the moment and it’s going to lead to a lot of PTSD, really. The shutters are coming down and she’s just going through her own hell. She’s locking it all in and trying to compartmentalise it which makes it worse. She’s just a ticking time bomb herself in terms of she doesn’t know how to deal with it. She’s lost.’
As the storyline unfolds, the trauma of this one incident leads to PTSD, which brings up past traumas that Charity has tried to hide inside herself, including the abuse she suffered at the hands of rapist Mark Bails (Rocky Marshall) when she was only 14.
‘The researchers have sent me loads of stuff which I’m reading and it’s going to be hard but it’s going to be rewarding,’ Emma said.
‘It’s going to start spiralling and everything starts to come up to the surface and be revisited again. I have been teased of a therapy session but it’s a therapy session that would last like a decade, surely! I think there’s probably too much to unpack in that one session.’
What commonly happens in soaps is that when a person becomes a killer, their days in the soap are numbered because a killer always has to have a comeuppance. Emma revealed that when she saw in the script that Charity killed Harry she did wonder whether that meant her time in the show would soon be up.
‘I guess I’m a bit like what will be will be,’ she told us.
‘You can never really be fearful of these things, because if my time at Emmerdale has come to an end, then I will always be okay because that’s my job, I’ve chosen to be an actor. You just sort of going with the flow. I did think at one point, “Oh, God, my character has now killed.”
‘But then when I read the script, I realised actually, it’s an act of love. It’s an act of self defence. She doesn’t do it purposefully. There’s no intent to kill. So that made me feel a bit better!’
