Coronation Street aired devastating acid attack scenes for Ryan Connor last night.
And now actor Ryan Prescott has revealed the road to recovery is long – and there’s more heartache to come for his character.
Appearing on This Morning today (Tuesday March 28) Ryan spoke to hosts Holly Willoughby and Alison Hammond about what’s next as Ryan comes to terms with his life-changing injuries.
Coronation Street: Ryan devastatingly injured
Ryan was getting ready to drive Daisy Midgeley to her wedding during Monday night’s Coronation Street (March 27) when her stalker, Justin Rutherford, attacked.
As Justin inched closer to Daisy clutching a glass of clear liquid, he told her no one would want her after he enacted his revenge. He then threw acid at her.
Although some of the liquid splashed onto Daisy’s chest, it was Ryan, who jumped in front of her to protect her, that took the full force. His face and chest were doused in acid.
Daisy acted quickly to get him under cold water and called an ambulance. But the future for Ryan looks very different to the one he was imagining.
Ryan Prescott on This Morning
Speaking on today’s This Morning actor Ryan Prescott opened up about how Ryan processes what’s happened to him. And he revealed there was more heartache ahead.
“It’s one of those things, when you go through a situation of real stress and a massive shift in your life, Ryan especially tries to reach out and grasp on to everything he can in order to deny his new reality,” he said.
“That is mostly being his relationships. One being with Alya Nazir and also his opportunity go to Ibiza with new love interest, Crystal. He tries to cling on to those things.”
He then added how heartbreakingly tough it’s going to be: “I think there’s a natural tendency to push the people away you love the most when you’re in such a vulnerable state, which there’s an element of as well.”
Ryan also added Coronation Street are not going to shy away from showing how long a process his recovery will be.
“That’s one thing we wanted to include: some kind of longevity, within parameters of soap, obviously it moves very quickly. But we wanted to have some longevity included within the aftermath.
“Acid attack survivors go through hundreds of operations, multiple skin grafts, quite often a lifetime of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and trauma therapy. So we wanted to have some longevity in the aftermath that showed the different stages of his recovery.”
Authenticity of the storyline
In fact, the soap has been very keen to make sure they portray the whole storyline authentically.
They have done extensive research with Ryan saying he went “down a rabbit hole” with it.
“No matter how much research you do,” he said, “I don’t think you can ever really comprehend this level of extreme violence. I met with some people from the Katie Piper Foundation, a gentleman called Andreas Christopheros, who’s an amazing guy.
Ryan admitted one of the things they were set on showing was the importance of getting water on the wound straight away.
“That’s one of the main things we wanted to get across is, god forbid if it ever happens to anyone, to get a constant running stream of water.”
He admitted they had to use cold water for the scenes where Daisy got Ryan in the shower because they couldn’t have steam showing. Ryan laughed that he was “completely unprepared” for the temperature!
Read more: Complete Coronation Street cast list 2023 – meet them all here!
Coronation Street usually airs on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 8pm on ITV.
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