Love/Hate's Mary Murray: 'I was destined to play the Wicked Stepmother in panto'

Love/Hate star Mary Murray has said she was “destined” to play the Wicked Stepmother in panto.

The Dublin actress feels she has has a “lifetime of preparation” for the role in Cinderella since she was a kid – after never loving the feel-good characters.

“Everyone wants to be a baddie. When I was a kid I wanted to play the Wicked Stepmother – not Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty,” she said.

Love/Hate: Mary as Janet in the RTE show | RTE

“I was a bit strange like that. When everyone else was stroking the hair of their dolls, I was smacking them off walls. I think I was destined to be a Wicked Stepmother.”

But Mary isn’t finding getting into costume too fun, as it takes her an hour to get into the clothes. She said: “The hardest work of all is putting the costumes on and taking them off.”

Meanwhile, Mary told 98FM that she finds it tough to be so well known from Love/Hate.

Panto role: Mary is in the Helix currently

She added: “You know when you want to say something nasty to somebody but then you can’t because they’ll go, ‘Janet from Love/Hate’s a bitch’. You have to be nice. Nicer than you actually are in person.”

And Mary said she doesn’t think a new season of Love/Hate “can do as well as it did” if it comes back in 2014. But she laughed: “We don’t care, we’re dead”

> Mary is currently starring in Cinderella at the Helix