All Creatures Great and Small's Callum Woodhouse has said that meeting the show's new star Patricia Hodge was a "surreal" experience as she was on the panel that auditioned him for theatre school years prior.

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Speaking to RadioTimes.com and other press, the All Creatures Great and Small star revealed that Patricia Hodge played a part in kick-starting his acting career.

When asked how he found acting alongside Patricia Hodge, who replaced the late Dame Diana Rigg as Mrs. Pumphrey for series two, he said: "Yeah, amazing. So the really weird this is, when I was auditioning for LAMDA, the drama school that I went to from 2012 until 2015, Patricia Hodge was on my panel and she auditioned me to get into LAMDA.

"She was part of that panel that ended up getting me into my three year course at LAMDA which was the start of my journey, really. I moved to London to move to drama school and I mentioned it to Patricia on set and I think she pretended that she remembered me. She probably saw like hundreds of people.

"But it was just, as you can imagine, an incredibly surreal experience, finding myself eight years later actually in a scene, doing dialogue with this woman who I auditioned for and desperately wanted to impress all those years ago and hopefully did.

"Now she's just a colleague. It's one of those 'pinch me' moments where you're like, 'Oh my god, I'm actually an actor. I'm actually doing this with this woman,' it's incredible. She's so lovely, she's just so much fun. Getting to watch her work is a real treat."

He said that Hodge was "amazing" as Mrs Pumphrey, before adding: "I think people are going to really enjoy her performance."

"I always quote things that [co-star Samuel West] has said because I can't come up with good quotes myself, but Sam basically said, after the incredibly sad passing of Dame Diana, I do think Patricia is going to be the benchmark of how you very respectfully take on a role and make it your own without any disservice to the performance of Dame Diana."

Rigg, who played Mrs Pumphrey in the first series of All Creatures Great and Small, died last year at the age of 82.

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All Creatures Great and Small returns to Channel 5 on Thursday 16th September at 9pm. Visit our Drama hub for more news and features, or find something to watch with our TV Guide.

Authors

Lauren Morris
Lauren MorrisEntertainment and Factual Writer
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