EastEnders star building ‘revolutionises’ Manchester after ditching London

Despite being from Southend-on-Sea in Essex, actor David Witts has chosen Manchester as home for his own acting studio, where the youngest student is still a teenager and the oldest is in his 80s.

But why Manchester? “IIt has everything you could need without any pretense,” he told the Manchester Evening News. “I lived everywhere. I spent three or four years in Los Angeles filming some TV shows there, and when I moved back to England after COVID, I wanted to live in the city and decided to check out Manchester.

“I didn’t know much about it, but I came over for the weekend and thought, ‘Yeah, I want to stay here!’ There’s just such a nice, welcoming atmosphere there. In terms of my desire for authenticity in myself and in the work I see from others, Manchester has authenticity built into it. There’s less pretense here than in other cities where I’ve lived. I just really enjoyed it.”

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And you might be hard-pressed to find anyone in town who disagrees. In Greater Manchester, Coronation Street is not only a television institution, but also a popular filming location for some of the biggest films and TV shows of recent years.

From 2022’s Marvel film Morbius and 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger to a number of Netflix adaptations of Harlan Coben’s best-selling novels and the streamer’s recent success story House of Guinness, which has been confirmed to air for a second time.

There’s also the BBC, which broadcasts some of its flagship shows from here, even choosing to cover the World Cup in the summer in Salford rather than follow ITV to New York, and a huge number of entertaining game shows filmed in MediaCity UK, from University Challenge to The Voice UK.

David, best known for his role as Joey Branning in the BBC series EastEnders, in which he starred The most popular newcomer at the 2013 National Television Awards, his Ardwick-based acting studio Work MCR isn’t necessarily looking to make the next northern star – with Greater Manchester being the former home of the likes of Sir Ian McKellen, Sarah Lancashire, Christopher Eccleston and Suranne Jones.

“Work MCR is essentially an actors’ studio that, like many things, has simply gotten out of hand,” he tells us. “I used to teach at other studios, as many actors do in between jobs. I realized that my way of teaching had become larger than teaching within someone else’s business.

“I wanted to teach small classes. I wanted people to share their real experiences rather than perfecting the pretense that acting usually is. “My interest was in getting people to actually stop acting – and by that I don’t mean give up their careers, I just mean stop pretending.

“It has become difficult to provide this kind of training to other companies because you have to stick to their framework. As an actor, especially as I get older, I’m not particularly interested in getting better at deceiving people into thinking I feel something that I don’t. I’m more interested in how deeply I can open up to share all the weirdness that lies within.”

The 35-year-old continues: “When you say it out loud, it sounds a little hippy. But I started with just ten actors who I knew and worked with very well, who I knew also wanted to work this way, and I started doing one session a week with them. Then other people started hearing about it and wanted to get involved because, as it turned out, a lot of the actors shared my desire to stop acting and share real feelings instead.

“Suddenly, after almost two years, we had a community of probably about 100 people taking classes with me regularly. We’ve created this community and it’s a bit of a revolution in Manchester in terms of actors who genuinely care about authenticity and are open and approachable people in their work.”

He adds: “The short answer is it just got out of control. You don’t start thinking, “I’m going to have my own acting studio.” You just do what you want and then suddenly you realize there’s something in it that other people want to share.”

What about the split between North and South? “I feel like I’m trying to bridge that gap, being a Southerner living here now,” David says. “It’s hard for me to fully describe the northern experience, but living in London and Essex (where I’m from), I used to think that London was the center of the universe and that I should be a stone’s throw away from it. It was really stupid of me.

“Once you move out of there, you realize that’s not the case at all, and I think a lot of people realize that. More and more people are choosing to live in different cities in the UK because they no longer need to be tied to the capital. The world has become smaller.”

When asked what he would like to change or achieve by opening his acting studio in Manchester, David, who starred in The Beekeeper and The Worker with Jason Statham, says: “It’s not so much about changing too much. It’s more about giving local actors the opportunity to train at a very high level without having to travel halfway across the country,” he says.

“The community of actors we have is amazing, incredibly supportive and really willing to challenge themselves to be better. Although my studio offers training part-time, the actors are fully engaged in their endeavors. I want the studio to be a place where people can get everything they need, rather than treat it as a fun hobby, thinking that “real learning” happens in London.

“Nobody really wants to watch someone ‘play’ them. We want people to be honest, real and sincere. So the training historically passed on by trainers 100 years ago is no longer as relevant when in 2026 we want to see true authenticity in people.”

And his own experience on the show also inspires David in the North. “Nordic soap is really respected in the North; people love them and really support them, maybe because they see the same people on television,” he says. “Coronation Street alone provides so much work for Manchester actors. IIt’s about time some of these Manchester actors actually got that opportunity rather than, you know, hiring casting agents using their London actors.”