EastEnders star Jamie Borthwick has opened up for the first time about suffering from a phobia of being sick, which left him scared to be away from home because he felt too “unsafe”.
The 27-year-old actor has played Jay Brown in the BBC soap since 2006, and in a new interview he has told how emetophobia - an extreme fear of vomiting, seeing vomit, watching other people vomit, or even feeling sick - has put a massive strain on his life, resulting in him being riddled with anxiety, and feeling “quite OCD” about germs.
He said: “I’ve never really spoken about it, but I’m just having a moment where I’m like, ‘Whatever.’ I’ve got a real phobia about being sick, called emetophobia.
Apparently, it’s the second most common phobia.
“I really suffer quite bad with that, and it affected me in so many ways. I didn’t want to go out, I didn’t want to shake people’s hands. It became a thing about germs and I got quite OCD about things like that.
“I didn’t want to be in busy environments where there were a lot of people.
"It just made me feel really anxious and I didn’t like that at all. I don’t really like being away from home. It started off just about that, but then as I got older it developed a bit more into random bouts of anxiety, where I just felt awful.
"I felt so unsafe. Then, it got to a point where it’s really frustrating. It was stopping me from living my life, it was stopping me from going out. I was missing opportunities.”
Jamie - who was just 12 years old when he first joined EastEnders - admits the phobia also made him “really selfish”, and while he accepts it will never go away, the star is now able to manage his condition.
He said: “I managed to seek the right help and it’ll never go. I will never ever be OK about being sick. Ever. But I just get to a point where I cope with it, and just deal with it the best way I can.
“But there was a point where it was not nice for me, or the people around me. Because if I didn’t feel good, if I felt anxious about something and wasn’t feeling right, that would peel off onto other people who I was with.
Because my mood would change and then it would affect them. If we were out I might be like, ‘I don’t want to be here, I want to go home.’ I became quite selfish. I just didn’t know where it came from, it just hit me randomly.
“I can understand it now. I’ve got a bag of tools I can use to manage it and understand there are going to be times where I’m not going to be in the environment where I want to be all the time. Things are not going to be catered to suit me all the time. I understand and accept that.
“I suppose I learnt to manage it the best way I could at the time, and I am going back five or six years ago now. I was just really selfish and I wouldn’t put myself in a situation that would make me feel unsafe.”
But Jamie would always feel safe in the company of his late EastEnders co-star, Dame Barbara Windsor, who died in 2020 aged 83, and he remembers the Carry On legend - who played Peggy Mitchell in the BBC soap - as a “complete icon”, as well as admitting he had a crush on her while watching some of her earlier work.
Speaking on the Lads, Dads and a Couple of Beers podcast, he added: “Her husband Scott [Mitchell] was my agent for six or seven years.
"He is just an amazing man, he really is. He’s so warm and nice and lovely, we’re great, great pals. He is a special person in my life. Barbara was as well.
“She was the first person I met on EastEnders and she had this wonderful ability to be able to calm people. You know you meet someone and you feel really calm and safe in their company - that’s what Barbara was like. You could feel her aura when she was there.
“She was a complete icon. I watched a clip of film Sparrows Can’t Sing, and I said to my dad, ‘She was a sort back in the day wasn’t she?’
"She really was. She was so showbiz, but in such a lovely way.”
