Neighbours spoilers follow.
Neighbours star Lucinda Cowden has confirmed that she is leaving her role as Melanie Pearson.
The actor made the announcement while appearing on the NeighBens fan podcast, after she answered the question of how she was doing with: “I am unemployed!”
Cowden went on to reveal that it hadn’t been her choice to leave the soap, and called it “a bitter old pill to swallow”.
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“I’m off, it’s true,” she said. “I’m sorry. I can’t do anything about it, it wasn’t my bloody decision. But yeah, Mel’s off in her truck and doesn’t have any plans of return immediately.”
She added that “it’s been a year of a lot of goodbyes”, as the hosts referenced other recent character departures including Toadie Rebecchi, Mackenzie Hargreaves and Haz Devkar.
Cowden explained that “all the contracts come up at the same time because we were all employed at the same time”, adding that she has known about Melanie’s impending departure since last December.
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Explaining that
she had found out about Ryan Moloney’s departure as Toadie a couple of days later, she said that finding out the news had helped her to make sense of the decision to axe Melanie.
“I don’t think they knew what to do with Mel without Toad, or without the family and all of that stuff,” she said. “That’s maybe… I don’t know, I’m second guessing. And you just make up all this stuff in your head anyway to make yourself feel better.”
Cowden also spoke about her castmates’ reactions to hearing that she was leaving, saying that “everyone was shocked to their socks”.
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She revealed that her final scenes involve Melanie’s friends and neighbours throwing her a going-away party, adding that she actually broke her nose while filming the scenes after she tripped on a step.
But Cowden added that these didn’t turn out to be her last scenes of all, as she has since “been back just really briefly, just for a couple of episodes”.
“Hopefully they’re going to keep Mel in the world and she can pop in and out occasionally,” she said. “Or more often than occasionally – regularly!”
Melanie originally appeared in Neighbours between 1987 and 1991, before making a return in 2021.
