Madeleine West feels like she is being paid to put on a "masterclass" when she portrays two characters on \'Neighbours\'.
The 38-year-olld actress stars as both Dee Bliss and Andrea Somers on the Channel 5 soap, which requires her to act out the same scenes but with a completely different character.
She said: "I\'m basically doing twice the work of everyone else. Sadly not double the pay, but I\'m not complaining because it was like doing a masterclass and being paid to do it! It was an absolute joy.
"They use a camera called the 4K which splits the screen and so you can\'t overlap yourself. I have to play both characters, filming the same scene twice, looking in both directions and also with a body double.
"Then I have to change costume, change physicality and change voice and then play the other character, playing out the same scene all over again."
Madeleine - who appeared in \'Neighbours\' from 2000 to 2003, and re-joined in 2017 - spent hours researching how to stand and speak like the two different characters, and admitted she deliberately didn\'t look back at old footage of Dee because she wanted to "rediscover" the character how she is now.
She added to What\'s On TV magazine: "It took a lot of research to play both Andrea and Dee. Each has a different voice, different ways of standing and different intonations.
"Dee isn\'t a carbon copy of that blushing bride she was 16 years ago when she supposedly died, she has lived as someone else all this time as Karen, and so she is a different person.
"I didn\'t look back at old clips of Dee from when I played her before. I wanted to rediscover Dee as she is now, in the environment she has been in, then add on the fact that she is now much older, she is in her 30s now.
"I don\'t want to mimic what she was like in her early 20s."
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