Just two episodes to go until Happy Valley is finished for good (sob) and the fates of Tommy Lee Royce and Sgt Catherine Cawood are sealed.
At the centre of Tommy’s desperate bid to escape prison and Catherine’s determination to see him behind bars has been Ryan, Catherine’s grandson, who was the result of Tommyraping her daughter Becky prior to series one.
Fans of the show have commented on the large age gap between the Ryan of season one and two and the one in season three – but it seems not everyone is aware that actor Rhys Connah has taken on the role for all three seasons.
Rhys – and his character Ryan – were just eight years old when the first series came out in 2014. Now, at 16, Ryan gets to have his own say in his relationship with his dad – despite Catherine’s best efforts to keep him away.
‘The plan was to wait for Ryan to be older so that he can make his own choices about whether he wants to have contact with his dad or not. So it really explores that,’ show creator Sally Wainwright told the Radio Times of the long (long) gap between series' two and three.
‘He’s someone who's trying to make sense of his past and find out the truth about his past. And you know, it's so complex. And it's so complex for the adults in his life to try and explain things to him without it being too distressing for him. So it's kind of all the complexities of that really.’
Wainwright has said that the possibility of recasting Ryan was dismissed when Rhys made it known he was keen to stay on board, but the young actor struggles to watch his early scenes.
‘I couldn't stand the sight of myself. When I watched it when I was younger I just watched my scenes and I'd go “oh, look, it's me, it's me”,’ he said on BBC’s Obsessed With Happy Valley podcast.
‘But watching it now, I'm just some tiny, little, annoying guy who does everything wrong, messes it all up and with a squeaky voice. I'm just watching it like “was I always that annoying?”’
But while we’ve seen Ryan choose to begin a relationship with Tommy when his uncle Neil takes him to visit his dad in prison, Rhys has said it isn’t a decision he would have taken.
‘From an unbiased perspective, it doesn't really make any sense to go and visit Tommy but one of the things when I was playing Ryan, played him, while disagreeing with his point of view I had to play him believable, I had to see why he would go and visit Tommy,’ he told hosts Amy Gledhill and Isy Suttie. ‘So I had to sort of convince myself of why he would go and do this.’
What else has Rhys Connah been in?
While Ryan is undoubtedly his biggest role to date, Rhys has got a number of credits to his name. Since series two ended in 2016, he's been films The Runaways and The Snow Maze, as well as The White Princess alongside Jodie Comer. He also starred in To Walk Invisible: The Bronte Sisters, the 2016 film about the Charlotte, Emily and Anne, which was also directed by Sally Wainwraight.
Rhys Connah Instagram
You can follow Rhys @rhysconnah, where he posts pictures from his time on set and regular life off screen.