Zoe Henry, who has portrayed Rhona Goskirk in Emmerdale since 2001, spoke candidly about her home life with Jeff Hordley in a new interview. The actress revealed how she was “in awe” of other people who made time to “watch boxsets” as this was far from her own experience. The 45-year-old wed the Cain Dingle favourite, 49, 16 years ago and they have two young children: Violet and Stan. She documented an average evening in their household while addressing their television careers, claiming the couple never take their “jobs for granted”.
“I’m in awe of people who watch box sets,” Zoe told Fabulous magazine. “I’m usually home by 7pm and hopefully Violet is back from school and cooking the dinner.”
The soap star continued: “After sitting down to eat and catch up with everyone I’ll help the children with their homework, tidy up and get them off to bed.
“My friends are always talking about the different TV shows they’re watching and I don’t understand how they find time.”
Zoe said she’s normally in bed by 9pm “with a good cookery book”, stating: “There’s nothing like a bit of food porn before bed.”
Meanwhile, the mother-of-two went on to discuss how Jeff never gets complacent despite having been in Emmerdale for nearly two decades.
She added: “You can’t in this industry. We have so many talented actor friends who aren’t working as much as they should.
“It’s a stark reminder of how lucky we are. I love being on a soap because you never know what your character is going to be getting themselves into further down the line, so it’s exciting.”
It comes as her alter ego Rhona is struggling to come to terms with her illness, with viewers seeing an emotional episode last week.
She was previously told she needed to have a hysterectomy in order to remove the fibroids on her womb.
The knock on effect meant she would no longer be able to have children, should she have wanted any and her relationship with Pete Barton (played by Anthony Quinlan) later ended.
Zoe appeared on Loose Women to discuss her character’s storyline and spoke about what will happen in upcoming scenes.
“It’s opened up a massive can of worms,” she began. “We’ve not really referenced the age gap actually between my character and Pete my on-screen boyfriend so it’s brought that into focus.
“And I really like that because he just terrifies her. Not only is she staring down the barrel of changing her own future, she’s impacting on somebody else’s who is younger, could go onto have kids, and she’s going to take that away from him.
“She sounds like she’s being a bit of a martyr but actually I think she’s seeing the bigger picture and going, ‘What can I give you? I’m useless’. It’s such a shock, it’s happened very quickly.”
But this sudden change will have detrimental effects on the vet as she will get tempted to take painkillers.
Emmerdale continues tonight at 7pm on ITV.