Home and Away star Lukas Radovich has seen his character Ryder Jackson really go through the mill recently. After almost suffocating when he was buried in a coffin for an online ‘challenge’, he’s been understandably stressed!
As well as the trauma of his brush with death he’s had the fury of granddad Alf Stewart (Ray Meagher) to contend with.
Alf has been raging at Ryder’s partner in crime Theo Poulos (Matt Wilson), blaming him for what happened.
The worry over wife Martha Stewart’s (Belinda Giblin) kidney failure has made him even more prone to go off the deep end than usual. But after reporting Theo to the police for taking the Polaris for a prank, Theo ends up in court.
“Ryder’s not happy about the way Alf’s being towards Theo because he understands he wasn’t at fault for what happened," Lukas explained to What To Watch.
“Alf is very protective of his clan. But also because of what’s happening to Martha, all the frustrations and lack of control he has come out and he expresses it towards Theo.
“Ryder doesn’t want to worry his family with what he’s gone through because he knows they’ve had a lot of stress on their hands.
“He’s struggling to cope because he hasn’t been able to express or talk about how he’s feeling.”
When Ryder accidentally gets locked in a storeroom after his shift at Salt, it sends him into a spin and he has a panic attack!
“Being locked in the store cupboard brings back memories of being trapped in the coffin so he’s not in a very good way,” shared Lukas, who previously told us that he found filming the ‘buried alive’ scenes genuinely scary!
“It was a lot better doing the storeroom scenes!” Lukas joked.
“The door doesn’t lock so I had one of the art department crouching outside holding the door. At least there was someone in there with me!”
After his latest anxiety attack, Ryder realises it’s time to get help. Still at odds with his family he moves into one of the vans to escape the tension at home. After a word from his worried aunt Roo Stewart (Georgie Parker) he agrees to get proper help.
“He starts to talk to someone at Lifeline,” shared Lukas about Ryder’s decision to call the well-known Australian crisis support charity.
“Everything gets a bit too difficult for him to cope with and he sees a flyer with the number and he calls them. It definitely helps.
Luckily for Lukas, he got a few tips about the process of talking to the crisis support line from someone in the know…
“Courtney Miller, who plays Bella Nixon, volunteers at Lifeline,” he revealed.
“Courtney studied psychology at university so she goes in maybe once a week to do a shift and answer calls.
“There’s a scene where Ryder calls Lifeline and I showed her the script and asked whether it seemed natural for me to be talking in this way.
“She said, ‘Oh you wouldn’t say this, you would say this’. She was quite helpful when it came to the dialogue.”
The Stewart family are normally so solid, it’s been sad to see them torn apart over recent months with Martha and Roo falling out over the kidney transplant and Ryder moving out of the house.
But Lukas is keen to reassure fans that things WILL get better!
“The Stewart family is one of the strongest families in the Bay so they’ll always go back to being united with each other! You can look forward to some nice moments.”
Home and Away airs weekdays at 1:15 pm on Channel 5 and 6:00 pm on 5Star followed by a 'first look' episode on 5Star at 6:30 pm.
