Sean Tully is about to become homeless in an upcoming Coronation Street storyline.
In scenes that will air next week, Sean will find himself sleeping rough after Fiz kicks him out of her house.
He later sets up a tent he’s stolen from a bin and sets it up in a car park, sleeping there for the night.
Sean thinks that his situation won’t last more than a night, but according to Anthony Cotton, the whole storyline will actually carry on for about three months.
The Corrie actor told Digital Spy that the combination of Sean losing his job and Fiz asking him to leave causes him to become homeless.
He said:
“Sean just pretends that everything is alright. Once he tells one lie about that, he has to continue it and it all just goes wrong, so it’s pride.
“Every avenue seems to be a dead end. So he just shrugs his shoulders and goes: ‘Well there’s not much I can do now.’ He thinks it’s temporary. He thinks it’s probably for one night or just 12 hours. But then it’s not.”
Cotton said that Sean will eventually move to a homeless village where he meets a woman named Carol.
The pair will swap stories that open Sean’s eyes up to the reality of homelessness.
Cotton has said that he hasn’t read too far ahead in the script to know how the rest of the street will respond to Sean’s situation.
He has, however, said that he has a personal connection to the storyline.
The actor explained that last year, he received a message from somebody he had met a few times asking him for help as he had recently become homeless.
“It just said: ‘Can you help me? I’ve got nowhere else to turn to, I’m homeless.’
“I wondered what could possibly have got him into that position, because when I knew him he had a missus, two kids, an Audi on the drive, and he was self-employed. I promised that I’d help him if I could.”
Cotton said that he contacted a local homeless charity who said that they couldn’t do much about getting the man off the streets.
He decided to book him into a hotel for a few nights and then set about approaching another organisation that eventually found the man a house with a private address.
“If somebody had said that to me without me going through this, I would have said: ‘That just doesn’t happen. Sean would not be in that position,’ said Cotton.
“But it turns out that it’s absolutely true. And very spookily, it was an identical story.”
