The 47-year-old is currently starring as Trish in Broadchurch, but admits that since leaving Coronation Street three years ago after a controversial assisted dying storyline, she has looked back with fondness on her role as belonging to an old-fashioned time.
Playing a transgender character in the mainstream ITV soap, Julie believes that if Hayley was cast today, the role would “surely” go to a transgender actor.
“Me playing Hayley now would be an anachronism, but I’m really proud of the strides that have since been taken in the transgender community,” Julie told Radio Times.
“Though I’m not going to take credit for changing society, I think having a character like Hayley at the centre of a soap like Corrie definitely helped.
“Though there’s still a long way to go – there are still hate crimes and prejudice against transgender people.”
The actress previously revealed that her initial Corrie casting was meant to be a joke on future soap husband Roy Cropper (played by David Neilson).
“I wasn’t meant to be in Coronation Street for any longer than two weeks. The character of Hayley was originally written as a joke. It wasn’t a politically correct one, but this was back in 1998.
“The joke was that Roy Cropper was going to go on a series of disastrous blind dates, one of them being with a man who had transgendered to a woman,” she told Stella magazine.
Julie has two children with actor and writer husband Ian Kershaw, and believes that her acting career would have been completely different if she were in America.
Hoping to see more “ordinary” people on British television, Julie added to Radio Times: “Though we’re pretty good in this country – we’re a long way off America, where someone who is supposed to be plain would be considered a real beauty here.
“But I think that art and culture should be representing diversity in programmes, and that diversity should be showing ordinary bodies and ordinary faces, big bellies, big a**es, big noses and everything else that we come with.”
The full interview with Julie Hesmondhalgh can be read in the latest issue of Radio Times, which is available now.
Broadchurch continues next Monday on ITV at 9pm.
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