Casualty fans were left gobsmacked at the end of the last series, when Doctor Nicole Piper (Sammy T. Dobson) broke up with her girlfriend, Ngozi Okoye (Adesuwa Oni), after she revealed she was an alcoholic.
Nicole later asked Ngozi to move out as a result, and months later, she carried on to chastise her former partner for her drinking.
Now, Casualty’s Nicole actor, Sammy, has opened up on the ‘intense’ messages she got from fans after the brutal scenes – and the doubts she had about her character behaving how she did. It comes after one huge TV star looks completely unrecognisable as she reveals latest facelift
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“It was such a rough moment as an actor to get the script where Ngozi told Nicole she was an alcoholic and she said, ‘Get out the house and take your kid with you,’” Sammy told InsideSoap. I went to the producers and said, ‘I don’t think Nicole would do that.’ But then they told me about this box set, and with context, you understand where it came from.”
“I got over 100 messages that night from people saying, ‘Why’s she done that?’ It was really intense, and I just felt awful. That scene was so brutal. But there is a good reason…”
Sammy was cast in the hit BBC hospital show in 2024 – although she accidentally revealed her announcement before the show itself…
“I put a thing on Instagram. It was literally a picture of my face, and you could just see the green top of my scrubs. It was just a little nod to it,” she explained. “And I said, ‘I’ve got really exciting news tomorrow that I’ve sat on for ages and I can’t wait to share it’. And a friend of mine messaged me saying, ‘Oh my God, are you a new doctor in Casualty?’” she revealed.
The character has been involved in a number of hard-hitting storylines since joining the show, including one in which she became a surrogate mum for her friend, Rosie, who was paralysed after the pair were in a car crash.
Her character quickly returned to work after the birth, and later experienced postpartum psychosis. Eventually, her colleagues, including her partner at the time, Ngozi, spotted the signs of PP and knew immediately that Nicole needed urgent help.
In her life outside the soap, Sammy was involved in a horrific car crash in 2012, which ripped off one eyelid, broke her thigh bone in two, left her face “looking like mincemeat”, put her in a wheelchair for three months and left her fearing it was the end of her career.
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Speaking of the incident before joining the show, Sammy told The Mirror: “Life is so utterly unpredictable. I have come full circle! It felt so bizarre that I had lost my career because of a car accident and then I was being brought in as a character who’d had one.
“When they initially told me, ‘you’ve been in a car crash’, my instant reaction was, ‘how did you know?’ But they were talking about my character, Nicole, rather than me!”