Lacey Turner says the death of Martin Fowler during the EastEnders 40th anniversary helped push her toward leaving Stacey Slater behind. She says the decision was still on her mind when she later stepped away from Walford last year.
Martin Fowler and the exit
“It’s a decision I found hard to fathom, and to be completely honest, one I’m still not over. I kept on asking ‘why’ – because it made no sense to me, surely there was another way?” Turner writes in Gold Dust: My Life (So Far) with the Women Who Shaped Me. That reaction points to the real pressure point in this exit: the story choice around Martin Fowler became the moment Turner began weighing her own future.
She also writes, “What I couldn’t be sure of was how Stacey would survive in Walford without Martin, and I didn’t know how I’d survive there without James.” That uncertainty turned a writing decision into a casting one, because the loss of one half of a long-running pairing changed the shape of the role she was playing every day.
Four weeks after birth
“I started to wonder if now might be the right time for me to step away too, I was about to have a baby, James was going, and Natalie Cassidy [Sonia] was also leaving,” Turner says. She adds, “The more I thought about it, the more I realised I needed some real time out and I loved the idea of taking my foot off the gas and being with my family for a while, so I told them I wanted to go too.”
She returned for the live episode just four weeks after giving birth, then stayed on to shoot Stacey’s mental health decline after it. Turner says, “I promised them I’d be there, even if it was in my maternity dressing gown,” which is about as blunt a production note as this kind of soap exit ever gets. It also shows she was still carrying major story load even as she was preparing to leave.
Walford after two decades
Turner says she misses Stacey, but also that the character had run out of things to go through and needed a break. “I’m not over. I don’t know what the future holds… I hope it’s not the end for Stacey,” she says, leaving the door open without pretending there is a date attached to it.
The practical read is simple: Turner has already departed Walford, but she is not writing Stacey out of existence. A guest-star return could come first, with a proper comeback next year, and the live-episode exit she lived through makes that gap feel less final than it first looked.
