A STAR who shot to fame while playing Peter Beale on EastEnders has revealed his reason behind quitting the soap.
Ben Hardy got recognition as an actor while in the Albert Square role between 2013 and 2015.
But he soon swapped the East London set for Hollywood, going on to star in films such as X-Men: Apocalypse and the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.
The 32-year-old opened up about feeling "stuck" in EastEnders before he left in an interview with Deadline, saying he felt like he needed "to get out of there."
"It was my screen education, I suppose," he shared. "I felt much more comfortable going to work on films, having had that day-in/day-out training of just all the technical stuff you don’t want to be thinking about on set.
"It becomes muscle memory. I think there’s a point where I had to leave, though, because I felt like if I didn’t leave, I’d get stuck in this."
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The English actor also admitted there were times when he felt like he was settling for doing worse performances in his role because the soap was so fast paced.
He added: "You’re trying to make it the best it can be, but it can leave you feeling a little bit unfulfilled because the nature of the beast is they have to produce so much material in such a short space of time. So things do feel a little bit rushed.
"For me anyway, personally, I reached a point where I felt myself starting to not try to make the best version of something, I found myself going, ‘That’ll do.’ Then as soon as that started to enter my mind, I was like, ‘I need to get out of here.’"
The Dorset-born lad thinks other actors were better suited to the show.
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He said: "There are some actors on there that are still very much engaged in trying to make things the best they can be, but for me, I felt like I was getting quite downtrodden and it wasn’t getting to a place where I wanted to be. I was starting to give up, and I was like, ‘I can’t do that.'"
Thom Law took over the long-standing role of Peter Beale from Ben Hardy, and has recently made a reappearance in Albert Square after it was revealed that Cindy Beale is not dead.
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