Exclusive:
Benidorm actor Oliver Stokes, who played Michael Garvey on the hit comedy, remembers having a very ‘odd’ fan during filming and has gone on to follow a completely different path to acting
Benidorm actor Oliver Stokes, 25, was barely 10 years old when he shot to fame playing Micheal Garvey in the hit ITV sitcom from 2007 to 2015. The former child star from Hull, who is now a father-of-one, does not remember the entire filming experience on account of being so young, but he does recall one elderly obsessive fan.
“There was this old woman, and she turned up to set on about three or four occasions with sweets for me,” Oliver explains to the Mirror at last year’s Benicon, a fan convention for Derren Litten’s iconic comedy series. “She was really odd as well. They [the show’s production staff] used to sort of say, ‘Yeah, we’ll give them to him.’ You know, and then they’d just be like, ‘We are just going to throw them away, because you don’t know what’s in them.’ I’m sure it was all kosher and she was nice but she was really quite obsessive.”
Oliver was looked after by his grandparents while on set in Benidorm playing the cheeky youngster who ran amok around the Solana Hotel pool. “I had to do a minimum of three hours of schooling a day, which was an absolute bonus,” he jokes. “But in a way, it wasn’t really the best because I didn’t really pay attention or do much work. Oh well, it was an experience.”
Although some of the jokes went over his head, he had a lot of laughs on the set of the hilarious ITV show which also starred Sheila Reid as his grumpy grandmother Madge, Siobhan Finneran as his mother Janice Garvey and Steve Pemberton as his dad, Mick. “The scene of the stag do, where we were all in the reception, it took us hours just to film the tiny little snippets. We all just kept breaking down in tears all the time because it was just hilarious,” says Oliver.
“When Adam Gillan [who played hotel guest Liam Conroy], turned up in those Y fronts and said ‘I’ve come as a premature ejaculation’. Unbelievable. Even at the age of 10 I found it funny. I don’t think I knew what it meant but everyone else was laughing, so I just laughed. Just the fact of everyone else being in stitches just made me find it hilarious as well,” he explains.
Oliver has now taken a step back from acting and works as a successful tradesman, explaining, “It got to a point where I just thought I wanted an income every month guaranteed, instead of not knowing when your next job is going to come. I’d love to get back into the future if the right thing came about but who knows?” Aside from keeping busy with his toddler Archie, he is also an avid fisherman and runs a fish bait company called Active Baits.
