Less Dawn, More Liv: Olivia Bromley on Life After Emmerdale
After eight years spent growing alongside one character, Olivia Bromley is stepping into unfamiliar territory. With Emmerdale behind her, she speaks to LO’AMMI about creative freedom, transformation, life beyond long-running drama and why the next chapter might extend far beyond acting.
When Olivia Bromley first joined Emmerdale, there was no eight-year plan.
Dawn was supposed to appear for around 12 episodes, entering as part of another character’s exit story. There was no fully formed history waiting for Olivia to step into, no expectation that this relatively small role would become the character audiences would come to associate with her for the better part of a decade.
Instead, Dawn stayed.
A few more episodes became a little longer, and a little longer eventually became eight years. Somewhere along the way, Olivia stopped simply arriving at work to play a character and found herself building one in real time.
“There was an interesting kind of symbiotic relationship with the writers,” she explains. “They would put something in, and I would put something in, and it started to develop.”
It is difficult to spend that long inside one person’s life without the role becoming a marker in your own. Olivia talks about the cast and crew becoming a family, about the rarity of working with the same people every day for years and about the safety that came with knowing the world around her so intimately.
But our conversation takes place at the opposite end of that familiarity.
For the first time in years, there is no next Dawn storyline waiting. No established routine. No single character determining where Olivia turns up to work or what emotional world she will inhabit next.
There is, instead, a blank page.
And while she readily admits that is daunting, Olivia sounds far more interested in what she can put on it.
Sophie Stopp: Spending eight years with one character gives you an unusually long time to develop alongside them. What did playing Dawn teach you about yourself as an actor that you do not think you could have learned from a shorter project?
Olivia Bromley: I learned so much. It is such a privilege, and such an interesting creative experience, to live in a character for so long.
The audience is with that character for years as well, so you have this extraordinary experience where the backstory is something people have actually watched. It creates a depth that you would not necessarily have with a smaller project.
Soap stories are also crazy. As an actor, you do not have much control over the direction the character is going in, so you have to go with it, which is part of what makes soap so fun and exciting.
I had not done much television before this job either, so being able to go in every day, film really fast, play so many different things and learn all the technical aspects of working on camera was invaluable.
For Olivia, leaving that environment means giving up something most freelance actors rarely have in the first place: certainty.
For eight years, she knew where she was working. She knew the character she was returning to. Now, the permanence of one role has been replaced by possibility.
Sophie: You have gone from having very little television experience, to being on television for eight years, to suddenly having this blank page in front of you. What feels exciting - or daunting - about having that freedom now?
Olivia: It is really daunting in a lot of ways because you get very used to a routine and a way of working.
But I think with anybody creative, you need to be challenged. You need to play different things, have different experiences and work with different people because that is what keeps you growing.
That is really exciting for me. When there is space, suddenly you start to feel more creative. You get excited about different opportunities, different projects and different ways of using your creativity.
There is a weird transition from being very, very busy and used in a particular way to suddenly looking at shorter projects rather than being one person for the rest of time.
That appetite for something different comes up repeatedly.
Dawn gave Olivia no shortage of material to work with, but much of it existed in darker territory. After years spent carrying some particularly heavy storylines, she is curious about what audiences might see if she is allowed to move towards something lighter.
Sophie: After being so closely associated with Dawn, is there a side of you as a performer that audiences or directors have not really had the opportunity to see yet?
Olivia: I have had the privilege of playing really intense, dark stories, and that is one of the wonderful things about continuing drama - you get thrown all sorts of stuff.
I have played a range of things over the years, but this character particularly has had a bit of a rough time. A lot of it has been quite sad and challenging, and there has not been a huge amount of comedy or lightness in her journey.
I would like to do a little bit more of that, maybe. It would probably be good for me to smile a little more on screen.
Anything really transformative and different from the characters I have already played would be exciting to me.
Transformation, more than any particular genre, seems to be the appeal.
Olivia began with classical theatre training before learning the demands of screen acting through what she describes as one of its best possible training grounds: soap. Nine scenes in a day, minimal rehearsal and sometimes only a couple of takes leave very little room for hesitation.
It also taught her something she came to love about working on camera: how little you sometimes need to do.
Sophie: Are there parts of your stage training that you still carry with you on camera? And what has television given you that theatre could not?
Olivia: My drama school training was very classically theatre-based. We learned a lot about vocal technique, projection and how to command a stage.
But I think working in soap is the absolute best training for television. You have no time, you often only have a couple of takes and you might be doing nine scenes in a day. You are forced to play things off the cuff because there is not much rehearsal.
It is really intense, but it is an amazing training ground.
What I realised is how much I love the technical side of screen work too - learning how to play something for different camera sizes, learning about lighting and learning how much of your internal world can be read on camera.
There is something really freeing about being able to be very small.
Now that Olivia can choose what “different” might look like, she is less interested in ticking off a particular genre than finding characters capable of taking her somewhere unfamiliar.
Sophie: Rather than a particular genre, what is it about a character or script that makes you think, I need to play this person? Has what you look for changed over the last eight years?
Olivia: The characters I get really excited about are the ones that feel very different from me. I think that is why, when I first came in and played Dawn, I found her so exciting.
Being able to transform – whether that is through accents or a completely different life experience – and properly play a character is super exciting. You get to enter a completely different world.
The most exciting characters are probably the ones that feel quite far away from myself. They are harder to play, but that is the challenge.
I would not say there is one particular type of character I am always drawn to. I just like characters that are well-rounded, have depth and vulnerability, and are written with real truth.
The freedom Olivia is talking about is not limited to which acting role comes next, either.
After almost a decade spent working within the very particular rhythm of continuing drama, she is beginning to think more widely about what a creatively fulfilling career could actually look like.
Success, in its most visible form, does not necessarily interest her as much as the work itself.
Sophie: When you imagine the next few years, what would make you feel creatively fulfilled rather than simply successful?
Olivia: I think there is a difference between being successful and creatively fulfilled. Although maybe being creatively fulfilled, to me, is success.
Just because you are working on a high-profile project does not mean it is necessarily a creatively fulfilling experience.
Variety is something I am excited about now, having done the same thing for a while. Soap is a very specific way of working, and I think being able to have a little more time within the creative process would be interesting for me.
Then, personally, being creative in other ways is exciting too. I write, I do a lot of music, and suddenly having the space to do those things is really inspiring.
Those interests are not simply hobbies waiting around the edges of her acting career. Olivia is particularly interested in film composition and is beginning to explore what happens when the different creative worlds she occupies start to overlap.
Sophie: You mentioned writing and music. Is that something you would like to become part of the projects you take on going forward?
Olivia: I think as an actor you always have to have other things going on. You cannot rely on going from job to job to job.
If you have other things that keep you creatively satisfied and fulfilled, that is amazing -especially if they can tie into the work you are already doing.
I am very interested in film composition, so I am exploring that at the moment. All of these worlds can mix together.
I think it is important not to rely purely on being an actor for your self-esteem or creative satisfaction, because there are lots of times in any freelance life where you are not doing it. It is important to me to have lots of different outlets for that.
There is another transition happening alongside the professional one.
For years, millions of viewers knew Olivia through Dawn. Long-running television creates a particular kind of familiarity: a character enters people’s homes so consistently that the line between actor and role can become strangely difficult to see from the other side of the screen.
Now, through events, shoots, fashion and simply existing publicly outside of that character, Olivia has the opportunity to introduce audiences to someone they have technically been looking at for eight years without necessarily knowing at all.
Sophie: Away from playing Dawn, audiences are starting to see more of Olivia through shoots, events and fashion. Has personal style become another way of expressing who you are outside of a character you have been associated with for so long?
Olivia: When you do a long-running character like this, it is so interesting how people struggle to separate the character from the actor.
You have been in people's living rooms for years as a very specific person, and when people meet me, they can be quite shocked that you are not the character and have not done the things the character has done.
It sounds very simple, but it is a little shift in people's brains to see you in a different way.
There is a kind of detachment that I am having to do now, where I am leaving that behind. I really feel ready to do that and to be me a little more.
Less Dawn, more Liv at the moment.
Perhaps that is the clearest description of the chapter Olivia Bromley is entering.
Eight years gave her the rare opportunity to discover just how deeply an actor can know one character. What comes next offers almost the exact opposite: the chance to find out how many completely different people - and how many different kinds of artist - she can become.
For now, there is no need to know precisely where the blank page ends.
She finally has the space to start filling it.
Photographer - Jemima Marriott
Stylist - Prue Fisher
Hair & Make Up - Megan McPhilemy
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