Billy Fletcher (Jay Kontzle) has recently decided to have another go at being a personal trainer in Emmerdale – with Kim Tate (Claire King) keeping an eagle eye on him to make sure his work for her at Home Farm doesn’t suffer.
The initiative didn’t get off to a brilliant start, with his first class consisting of only three people: Bear Wolf (Joshua Richards), Sam Dingle (James Hooton) and Manpreet Sharma (Rebecca Sarker). Of these, it was only Manpreet who looked anything like keen, but at least she decided to take up further one to one sessions.
It was noticeable that, during the class, Manpreet kept casting the occasional admiring glance at Billy’s biceps. It turns out that she’s quite keen to get even more personal with her personal trainer.
In upcoming episodes Manpreet confesses to Ella (Paula Lane) that she has a crush on Billy, and Ella warns her that it would be a huge mistake to try to take things further. After a few drinks, however, Manpreet throws caution to the wind and plants a kiss on Billy’s lips.
Billy tells his wife Dawn (Olivia Bromley) about this straight away, and Jay Kontzle told Metro.co.uk that, while Billy’s shocked by Manpreet’s advances, he isn’t worried about the impact of the kiss on his and Dawn’s relationship.
‘It’s one of the things where in the back of your mind you’re like “God, why have you done that?”’ he told us.
‘But at the same time, I think that Billy and Dawn are that strong that nothing can really fracture their relationship, I think that there’s nothing there that would make Dawn think any differently of Billy and doesn’t think that he’s that type of person so I don’t think it’s really a significant worry there at all, it’s just one of those things.’
Of course it’s not the first time that Billy has had to deal with unwanted advances, as Gabby (Rosie Bentham) previously kissed him too. Jay was very clear that Billy would be able to resist temptation.
‘He loves Dawn, he loves his family. From day one, Billy’s very much focused around family and to be able to have his own family, even though we’ve got children in Clemmie (Mabel Addison) and Lucas (Noah Ryan Aspinall), they’ve got their own child now that brings them together fully, and that’s exactly what he was after, so I don’t think that any outside influence is going to fracture the relationship, it would be something internal.’
As tight as this marriage is, there are going to be huge battles ahead for this couple as Billy and Dawn are about to face a terrifying time when their baby Evan is diagnosed with leukaemia.
For Jay, who welcomed his third child in real life in 2022, this story is a hard one to play.
‘I thought it was dead difficult when I got this story because I’d literally just had another baby in real life, and I was like “Now I’m worried about my own child, watching him grow, I don’t want something like this happening,”’ he admitted.
‘That’s why these stories are really pivotal to happen in shows because it makes you think about it a little bit more and it makes you a bit more aware and obviously that’s the whole purpose of it being there, but at times it does really grate on you because you are really stressed about your own kids and making sure you spend enough time with them because obviously nothing’s certain, you don’t know what’s around the corner.
‘You kind of want to be able to portray that on screen as realistically as possible so people can relate to it as close as they can possibly do.
”We requested that we wanted to have case studies and speak to people and understand what parents have gone through, the stresses, and just understanding it properly, because there’s no point in doing a story if you’re not going to dive fully into it and understand it properly.’
