Natalie Cassidy teases EastEnders return
Natalie Cassidy quit EastEnders in 2025 after 32 years on-and-off playing Sonia Fowler.
Natalie Cassidy teased she could return to EastEnders in eight years.
The 43-year-old actress said goodbye to her BBC soap alter ego, NHS nurse Sonia Fowler, in April 2025 after 32 years on-and-off to do other projects, including her Life with Nat podcast and BBC documentary, Natalie Cassidy: Caring Together, in which she trains as a professional carer.
On the latest episode of the Please Keep Me Anonymous podcast, the entertainer said: "I was 41, and I thought, ‘No, I've got to get out of here.'
"It's was weird, really, because the pattern was, I started when I was 10, I did 12 years, had eight years off, and I went back for 12, and I left."
Natalie then joked about returning to Albert Square in 2033, adding: "So maybe I will go back in eight years, you never know, do you?"
Her last EastEnders episode was April 17, 2025, in which Sonia left Walford for Bali with her daughters Rebecca "Bex" Fowler (Jasmine Armfield) and baby Julia Fowler, and her sister Bianca Jackson (Patsy Palmer).
Natalie laughed about a mistake with her final scene: "She's living it up in Bali, she took her little baby to Bali, who was about two days old with no passport, it's hilarious.
"I don't even think the birth was registered... But anything can happen in soap world!"
The Cooking with the Stars 2025 champion's eldest daughter, Eliza, is glad her mum is no longer in EastEnders, which she joined in 1993, left in 2007, before making a brief comeback between 2010 and 2011, and then returned in 2014.
In April, Natalie told Closer magazine: "Eliza watches EastEnders. She always thought Sonia was a bit boring. That was always good for the soul!
"I wasn't her favourite character. She was a bit dull, I think, for Eliza."
Natalie - who has Eliza with her 45-year-old ex-partner Adam Cottrell, and Joanie, nine, with her fiance, EastEnders cameraman Marc Humphreys - admitted she felt "liberated" after leaving the soap.
In September 2025, she explained to Prima magazine: "It’s been freeing leaving EastEnders. I feel liberated and just happy.
"Albert Square will always hold a place in my heart, and I love it there. There could be a storyline where I come back for a week – those things are great.
"But it took up a lot of time. I used to be learning lines in the evening, and that’s gone now.
"And then I’d be up at six in the morning. You’re not a scaffolder or a heart surgeon, but it did take a long time, whereas now, my evenings are free, unless I’m recording a podcast at home."
