EastEnders spoilers follow for New Year’s Day.
EastEnders has confirmed the details of Max Branning’s upcoming New Year’s Day special episode, which see a flash forward in time for the entire 30-minute runtime. The BBC previously released an image of Max in a suit wearing a blood-splattered white flower, and now showrunner Ben Wadey has confirmed that, yes, there’s a wedding involved.
“Going into New Year, Max promises that he is a reformed character, but is he going to be able to hold that up over the year?” Wadey said at a recent screening event.
“Flash forward a year, and [we see] the chaos that ensues and everything that he’s got up to – with him getting married, and there’s a woman in the bed next to him, who was clearly pregnant when he wakes up.
“So there is a whole heap of chaos. So we wanted to promise all of that.”
Mark Rogers//BBC
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He explained that he “just loved” the previous festive flashforward with The Six, calling it “so clever and so well executed”.
“The fan in me got really excited, and was looking online at the different theories around it and having my own theories around it. And I thought, let’s do that again, and how big can we go with it, and how brave can we go with it? Go big or go home.”
Wood added that Max is “probably at an all-time low” on New Year’s Eve, which is in “stark contrast” to what we see in the time jump. “So we see a man who’s maybe at his lowest we’ve ever seen him. And then we flash forward and things are maybe not quite as bad. I really like the build-up, the build-up to New Year – those scripts are just amazing.”
BBC
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Speaking about Max’s return more generally, Wadey added that: “We knew Max was coming back, and I’ve been working on Jake since the day I stepped into the job to persuade him to return.
“And in my first few weeks, we brought in Oscar. We knew we had really big material coming up for Lauren as well, so we were talking about the Branning clan as a whole, and what’s next. And Max has such a rich legacy in history in the show.
“One of the writers said, ‘the thing is, for Max, life is like one big game of kiss, marry, kill’. And we all kind of went, ‘it is, isn’t it?’ And that set out this idea, set something running for us that we got really excited about.
“And I wanted to see what Max’s return could look like in terms of his relationship with his kids. Did he want to change? And could he change? Could he be a better dad? Is he always going to be the womaniser that he was before, or is he redeemed?”
EastEnders airs on Mondays-Thursdays at 7.30pm on BBC One. The show also streams on BBC iPlayer, where most episodes drop early at 6am ahead of their TV broadcast.
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