"Wasn’t my choice": Star spills on Neighbours exit
Neighbours star Ryan Moloney has revealed the truth about his surprise exit from the soap opera after almost 30 years on the show.
The actor made the announcement that he would be leaving the show, and his character Toadfish, in a video posted to Neighbours' Instagram account in late June.
In a recent interview with Australian soap opera website Back to the Bay, he finally opened up about leaving Toadfish behind after all these years.
“Well, it actually wasn’t my choice. It was their choice,” he told the outlet.
“So, yeah, I’ve been wanting to leave for quite a long time, but Neighbours is one of those jobs that you work with awesome people. You get paid really well. And if you had a mate who had one of these jobs, you’d be saying, ‘oh, mate, what are you doing? You’ve got to stay there. See it out for as long as you can.’”
The actor said that he felt pressure to “suck it up and stay” despite wanting to move on - so in the end, he was “quite grateful that they actually made that decision for me because I don’t think that I could ever say no to a contract.”
“And that’s kind of not the way you want to be doing Neighbours. You don’t want to have that kind of level of resentment in there. So I was very grateful for it,” he said.
Moloney made his debut on Neighbours as a teen in 1995, and stayed with the show until it was axed in 2022. He was then a returning cast member when the show was rebooted a year later.
Image: Network 10