Mathew Horne would have struggled to act out an affair on \'Gavin & Stacey\'.
The 41-year-old actor - who will reprise the role of Gavin Shipman alongside Joanna Page\'s Stacey West in the beloved sitcom\'s upcoming Christmas special - has admitted the potential plot considered by co-creators James Corden and Ruth Jones would have been too much of a stretch for viewers and the cast.
He\'s quoted by the Daily Mirror newspaper as saying: "They decided it was too much and it would have been really hard to play that. I don\'t think you\'d believe Gav would stray."
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In the end, Ruth, 53, and James - who also play Nessa and Smithy in the show - decided the idea just wasn\'t right as they didn\'t want to write in a major moment for the sake of the drama.
She explained: "We didn\'t want to make it like a big explosion, we wanted to keep it as real as possible, true to the characters as possible.
"But also you have to have a narrative drive in there as well. We did take a while to decide.
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"We were talking one day, \'Is Gavin going to have an affair?\' and those ideas didn\'t feel right with the show."
James, 41, recently agreed with the sentiment, and explained how the duo spent some time trying to get back to the root of the characters.
He said: "And then, in about 90 minutes, we wrote a scene between Gavin and Stacey that comes right in the middle of the episode.
"And as soon as we\'d written that scene, we both got quite emotional because we thought, \'There they are, there\'s the characters we love\'.
"After we\'d written that scene, there was no option really. We just thought, \'Right, we have to do this now.\' "
19 February 2026 - 4:23 AM
7 April 2023 - 4:01 AM
