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Even if you’ve never watched EastEnders, you probably know Natalie Cassidy. The 40-year-old occupies that rare space in British culture – she’s played the same beloved character for so long that she’s seeped into the national consciousness. For three decades now, the gobby, trumpet-loving Sonia Fowler has been on our screens, in our magazines, even on the front pages of our newspapers. Who could forget her headline-making storyline in 2000, when the then-15-year-old had a baby despite not knowing she was pregnant?
Since then, Sonia has been married, divorced, and everything in between. There is an affection for her, and for Cassidy, that is both sincere and tongue-in-cheek. Cassidy has become the nation’s sister, daughter, friend – and a camp icon.
Cassidy was 10 when she was chosen to play Sonia. Two years earlier, she’d been picked out of her school in Islington to appear in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Beggar’s Opera. “I loved it,” she remembers. “The theatre, the smoke coming up through the floorboards…”
After that, she signed up for weekly classes at the Anna Scher Theatre – a performing arts school geared towards working-class students – and it was doing improv there that she caught the eye of EastEnders’ casting directors. “I was in the right place at the right time,” is how Cassidy puts it now. “But being professional and being good enough to not be written out – that’s my part of it.”
Sonia swiftly became a part of the EastEnders furniture, and Cassidy a household name. Her distinctive voice and delivery made her instantly recognisable – and ripe for comedian impersonations, like Morgana Robinson’s, which she thinks is “brilliant”.
But growing up in the public eye was not easy, and the 2000s in particular were a notoriously brutal time to be a female celebrity. Cassidy’s body became public property: she lost weight and put it back on, and magazines would put “circles of shame” around parts of her body deemed substandard.
She’s sanguine about it now. “You look back on things retrospectively and go, ‘Oh, that was quite shocking,’” she says. “I also didn’t really read a lot of it. I’m a big believer that if you read everything, you have to be prepared for the bad stuff. But actually, I didn’t care – I wore whatever I wanted.”
At the time, Cassidy capitalised on the interest in her body (and her weight loss) by releasing a fitness DVD – a cultural staple of the noughties. She wouldn’t do it again. “I just think it gets people’s eyes on you, regarding what you look like and stuff,” she says. “But it’s all learning. The age I was, it was a good job and good money.”
If Cassidy has changed over these years in the spotlight, so too has Sonia. During her first EastEnders era, which lasted 13 years before she departed in 2007, she was argumentative and chaotic. But since returning permanently to the show in 2014, she’s become something of a matriarch, following in the footsteps of her on-screen grandmother, the legendary June Brown’s Dot Cotton. Like Dot, Sonia is a comforting presence who imparts wisdom to the younger residents of Albert Square. Right now, she’s going through IVF with her partner Reiss Colwell – a far cry from the show’s many murders and affairs.
“I see Sonia as the fabric,” says Cassidy. “I feel like she’s like the curtains and the wallpaper. She grounds it. And I’ve not been an unkind character, so people are always very nice to me.” She remembers going on nights out with Charlie Brooks, who played arch-villain Janine Butcher, where they would get “two very different greetings” from fans.
EastEnders is on a hot streak right now. After hitting its lowest-ever viewership in 2021, ratings are climbing, viewers having been drawn back in by major storylines. The 2023 Christmas episode finally unmasked Linda Carter as the murderer of Keanu Taylor after a tantalising year-long build-up. Now, the walls are closing on “The Six” – the half-dozen co-conspirators in the death – as Keanu’s body looks set to be discovered.
Cassidy thinks Chris Clenshaw, the show’s executive producer, is behind its rebound – plus, a return to more basic soap principles. “You can try and change it, but just don’t reinvent the wheel,” she says. “Because it just works.”
Cassidy still watches EastEnders every night, because she likes to be able to tell her colleagues when they’ve done a good job. She clearly enjoys talking about the show. She enjoys talking about TV shows she’s not on, too, which is why she’s launched a podcast about them. Off the Telly, a new BBC Sounds podcast Cassidy co-presents with Joanna Page (from another British TV institution: Gavin & Stacey), sees the pair dissect and bicker over the TV they’ve been watching each week in a fun, gossipy way. (Cassidy loves: cooking shows. She doesn’t love: true crime.)
The first two episodes from the self-confessed TV addicts discussed The Apprentice, Netflix rom-com One Day and the experience of watching the darts while devouring a cheese board. “I love the fact that it’s two women doing it – two working mums,” says Cassidy. “I think that’s really refreshing for people to see us juggling the home and work and telly as well.”
As ever, Cassidy is completely charming on Off the Telly. She’s good at being herself. A warm and endearing presence, she’s won over viewers on Strictly Come Dancing, Celebrity Big Brother, and Becoming Mum – a 2010 reality series that followed her journey into motherhood for the first time.
It’s no wonder she’s become a central figure in “hun culture” – an online subculture that idolises a certain strata of famous working-class British women, while also taking the mick out of her leopard print kettle and weakness for a premixed gin-in-a-tin cocktail. Instagram accounts like Love of Huns and Hunsnet celebrate women like Alison Hammond, Katie Price, and Cassidy, women who embody a certain survivor spirit while also being willing to laugh at themselves. Cassidy and Sonia are regular reference points. “It’s iconic, isn’t it? I feel really honoured,” she says. “I’m very proud to be a hun.”
The resilience and positivity that have sustained Cassidy in the public eye have helped her to deal with difficult personal moments, too. In 2021, Cassidy’s father Charles died. He had ongoing health issues and Cassidy says she had a gut feeling when his life was coming to an end. Her home – where her father lived for his final years – became a revolving door of his friends and family, before he died a week later. Losing him has made Cassidy realise how bad British people are at talking about death and grief. Whenever she describes her father’s death as a “good” ending, people react awkwardly.
“As soon as someone is pregnant, you’re texting, ‘What does it weigh? How did you give birth? What colour eyes are? What’s the name?’” she says. “But when someone dies, most people just say, ‘I’m really sorry,’ and that’s it. There’s no, ‘How did that happen? How did you feel about it? What was it like?’ It’s still very uncomfortable.”
Cassidy’s mother died when she was 19, so she never got to meet Cassidy’s two daughters, Eliza and Joanie. The 13-year-old Eliza – who appeared on Channel 4’s Junior Bake Off in 2022 – shows signs of following in her footsteps. Cassidy isn’t sure how to feel about that. “I’ve been an actor for a very long time and she sees that, but I’m like, ‘This isn’t normal! I’m just extremely fortunate.’”
As for Sonia, what’s next for her? “I still think she’s got that fire in her. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of her screaming and shouting – if it were necessary.” Will Cassidy play her forever? “I would love to think that I can remain as Sonia for as long as I can, but also that I could pop in and out and do so many different things,” she says. “You know, I haven’t done MasterChef yet.”
Whatever she does, it feels like people are rooting for Cassidy. “Maybe it’s because they’ve watched me grow up – I’m like a friend off the telly,” she suggests. “I think people like that I’m normal, that I’m not always done up and that I don’t really give a shit. I am who I am.”
