In the audition room, Mark Charnock picked up the script and felt his heart sink. Another one he wouldn’t get.
‘Marlon appears, he is a Greek god, an Adonis, the sort of man who makes women melt’, it read.
Yes, this was Marlon Dingle. Anyone who has watched his character’s exploits over the past 25 years in Emmerdale will feel a good deal of confusion - and back then, going for the role he hoped would transform his career, so did a 27-year-old Mark.
“I went into the loo and looked in the mirror and thought ‘They have got the wrong guy’,” he recalls.
“I said to the director ‘Can I just ask you about this description? He said ‘Oh yes don’t worry, he’s now a nerd who thinks he’s those things’.”
I laugh a little bit too loudly at this point. “I don’t know what you’re laughing at?” Mark accuses. Then joins me.
Thankfully, he’s as good-natured today as he was back then.
“They were going to have him as an absolute hunk, a beautiful, carved thing. At some point someone said wouldn’t it be funny if he was just an absolute dweeb who thought he was that? That was why I got the audition.
“It made me feel great,” he insists, when I ask. “I thought ‘Thank god I don’t have to pout my way through this’.
He just said it so bluntly it made me laugh and relax.
“It’s a living, my sort of nerdy-ish appearance, I have been lucky - it’s meant I’ve been cast in parts I really loved. I don’t know how many nerds they saw that day, but I’m glad they saw me.”
On his 28th birthday Mark, now 53, was told he’d got the part, and admits he has never once thought of leaving.
A quarter of a century on, the actor has been nominated for two gongs at the British Soap Awards on Saturday night, Best Dramatic Performance, and Best Leading Performer - the latter a new, combined category, in which he is the only male nominee.
His latest storyline has seen Marlon survive a stroke, and fight to come to terms with the impact.
Telling the story of “people who have been through hell” has carried the greatest responsibility of any of those he has worked on previously, says Mark. It made him nervous, highlighting a condition he never realised was so prevalent and debilitating.
It’s storylines like that which keep him in the role, which he stresses has never been dull.
Stability too, is something he prefers.
“The idea of doing day in, day out work really appealed to me, I don’t know if it’s my working class background, the work ethic?” he says.
Mark opens up proudly about his working class roots. One grandfather was a miner working between Wigan and Manchester, the other a window cleaner from Bolton, Lancashire, where Mark is from.
Mark’s father was a lathe turner among other jobs, his mum an auxiliary nurse.
He was the first in the family to go to university, to study drama, then Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. “The first show off,” he says, self-deprecatingly.
He relied on grants, whatever his parents could “cobble together”, and then worked flat out to support himself in the capital. Being working class did make the acting world harder to penetrate.
“It was only a glass ceiling in the sense I had to keep earning money to live in London and live that life,” he explains.
“I was a cleaner, I worked filling envelopes day after day, that was so bleak, pub work, waitering. But it was exciting.”
For a year after drama school he worked in a book shop and secured no auditions.
“I don’t think I had the right face for the parts I was being up for,” he laughs.
Then finally, a role as a novice monk in 1990s’ drama Cadfael, alongside Derek Jacobi, his acting hero, changed everything.
Small parts in soaps and regional theatre in the north west followed, and then Emmerdale came knocking in 1996.
“I remember doing Chekhov directed by Alan Ayckbourn in Scarborough. I remember saying to another cast member that I’d love to do a soap, and bizarrely an Emmerdale producer came with a casting director to watch,” he recalls.
TV was always what he had wanted to do, and you get the feeling he is still over-awed by the fact he’s doing it, all these years on.
Even now, he admits he fears losing his job at any moment.
“You can never think beyond the end of your contract, ever,” he explains. “Often they will ring you and it’s kind of like the doctors - ‘It’s nothing to worry about, we just need you to come in…’
“They know me well enough to say ‘nothing to worry about’. You do get a bit like ‘could this be it?’”
He’s not too cool to admit he loves a good awards do.
He won his first and only gong in 2004, but it’s the socialising he likes.
The Soap Awards have been postponed for the last two years, and he’s keen to get back and mingle with the other soap actors, as well as hang out with his co-stars.
Dominic Brunt, who has played Paddy Dingle alongside him for 25 years, is a great pal.
Both horror fans, they used to run a zombie film festival together.
They’ve grown up together, then? Er, no, not exactly…
“If you listened to our conversations - and you couldn’t hear the ancient croak in our voices - you would assume it was two 20-year-olds talking,” laughs Mark.
“We have not really changed, we bonded over horror films and that’s not really changed - it’s quite depressing really!”
But top of the wish list for a chat at the bash this weekend? Quite a surprising choice.
“It’s always lovely to bump into Adam Woodyatt, always nice to sit with him and his missus and spend an hour talking,” he says. “I am a bit starstruck by him, he’s Ian Beale.”
Part of Mark is still that kid who won the role of nerdy Marlon all those years ago, desperate to be a soap star.
In the eyes of Emmerdale fans though, he’ll always be their Adonis.
