Annette Badland said death threats after her Babe Smith role in EastEnders kept her out of the public eye for about six weeks. She said security treated the messages seriously enough to tell her to change her routine and stay inside.
The former EastEnders actor said she did not go out, did not tell people where she was going, and did not use social media during that stretch. She said the threats were tied to a character she played from 2014 to 2017, which turned a soap storyline into a real security issue.
security and six weeks
Badland said the warning came from security after calls that included red alert code words. That detail matters for anyone on a long-running TV show: once a fictional villain draws threats aimed at the actor, the response moves beyond publicity and into personal safety planning.
She said the situation lasted about six weeks while police tried to identify where the messages had come from. Investigators traced them to a public computer just outside Liverpool, but they could not get much further because the machine was public.
Babe Smith and the fallout
Badland said the problem grew out of how some viewers handled Babe Smith. The character was fiction, but the reaction treated the actor as if she were the villain herself, which is why the threats became more than a soap aftershock.
She said, "Because I was leaving, they racked up my villainy and was actually thrown out, literally thrown out of the pub by Danny." That puts the final stretch of her 2017 exit in sharper focus: the more the show leaned into Babe Smith’s behaviour, the more exposed the performer behind her became.
She also said, "They eventually traced it to just outside Liverpool but it was in a school, they didn’t think it was a child but because it was a public computer, they couldn’t get much further. It took about six weeks and they just told me not to go out." The clearest takeaway is simple: the threat was not a loose fan complaint, but a period where a working actor had to narrow her life around a message trail investigators could not fully finish.
For Badland, the unresolved part is not whether the role was memorable. It is who used that public computer and why the threats escalated far enough to keep her indoors for six weeks.
