A bizarre piece of casting news just in today. Ex-EastEnders actress Michelle Ryan, who played Zoe Slater for five years, has won the lead role in a remake of The Bionic Woman!
The original 70s series starred Linda Wagner as tennis pro Jaime Sommers, whose body is rebuilt with advanced technology following an accident, giving her superhuman powers. The series was a spin-off from The Bionic Man, where Lee Majors was similarly upgraded as astronaut Steve Austen.
The new pilot for a potential revival of the kitsch TV series begins shooting soon. 22-year-old Ryan apparently had a lot of competition from American actresses, but her audition impressed executives enough to win through.
Michelle Ryan is undoubtedly a very beautiful young woman, who commendably never started posing for various lad's mags just to keep her profile up. Her only high-profile job has been in EastEnders, so many people will be greeting the news with a typically cynical "East End chav gets lucky in the States" mentality, but there's more to Ryan than that. She's actually very middle-class and posh-sounding in real life and I'm sure her acting range extends beyond Zoe Slater...
So look out for her in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park alongside Billie Piper soon and as James Nesbitt's co-star in a new Jekyll & Hyde adaptation for the BBC. It's also interesting to note that Nesbitt apparently demanded Ryan's role was increased and some of her excised scenes reinserted because he thought she was that good.
I'm very happy with this news. We never champion homegrown talent, particularly when they "defect" to the States -- but why not? Ryan's clearly talented and undoubtedly gorgeous, so I'll check out The Bionic Woman redux and have my fingers crossed it turns into a top-rated NBC series.
