Coronation Street: Rowan pushes Leanne to face her demons Coronation Street star Emrhys Cooper, who plays cult leader Rowan Cunliffe in the ITV soap has fast become the most hated man in Weatherfield as he has sucked Leanne Battersay (Jane Danson) into the sinsiter Institute. While a cult on the cobbles may not seem the most plausible storyline Emrhys says things like this really do happen and he knows as he has first hand experience. Speaking exclusively to Express.
co.uk the 39-year-old actor said: "It was Kismet ironic and very much poetic justice that I would play Rowan in Coronation Street , given my personal experiences with cults. My parents wound up unknowingly in a cult," he confessed.
While he won't reveal the cult in order to protect his parents he admits: "I saw just first hand the dangers and the consequences of their experience. And growing up in Totnes it's a hotbed for New Age thinking, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does attract a lot of charlatans, gurus and holistic doctors that don't have the qualifications or training with what they're selling. "So unfortunately, my parents did fall victim to quite a few in Devon, which meant I did feel very unsafe growing up, because I had these strange figures coming in and out of our lives and home, and I couldn't really understand growing up," he recalled.
Motivated by his experience Emrhys made a movie about the subject years before joining Coronation Street which required even further research into the t.