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Born in Hartlepool, County Durham, in 1995, Lewis Cope is an actor and dancer. Aged 13, he made his first stage appearance in the West End production of Billy Elliot the Musical. After competing on the series Got to Dance in 2013, he trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama. Cope has since appeared on television series such as Doctors and Vera, and in Emmerdale, as Nicky Miligan, from 2022 to 2024. He performs in the Strictly Come Dancing live tour until 15 February.
This is me in a dress, playing Michael in Billy Elliot the Musical. Michael is Billy’s gay best friend – he wears his sister’s clothes without fear or shame, and is the one who inspires Billy to be whoever he wants to be. Being part of that story at such a young age was a complete eye-opener. It was also the point in my life when I realised my dream of performing was achievable, and that I was ready to do it.
In spite of what I do for a living, I’ve never really craved being the centre of attention. I grew up in a family of 14 – eight brothers and five sisters – and I was number 10. There was never a quiet moment, and as the older ones grew up, they looked after the younger ones. Everyone chipped in. Our family home had two staircases, so you could go up one way and come down the other. There was a constant sense of movement: people coming in, people going out, parties happening, noise everywhere. Underneath all of that chaos was a strong sense of love.
My mum always said I was very strong-minded. If I decided I was going to do something, then I would do it. But because there were so many of us, I was quite selfless and a good team player. Mainly I liked to work hard. Mum was a beautician and ran her salon out of one of the rooms in our house; she’d have a client in, then dash out to put food in the oven for the kids, somehow making everything work at once. She was brilliant at juggling everything without ever making it feel like a burden.
With so many of us to entertain, Mum would often end up taking all of the kids to one activity: horse riding, football, boxing. One day she took me and my brothers to a dance class. I hated it but my brothers loved it. Mum told me I could either sit with her or join in. I figured I might as well give it a go. That decision, as small as it felt at the time, changed everything.
When I started at secondary school, I stopped dancing. Back then, dancing didn’t feel cool and I wanted to fit in. So when my dance teacher told me auditions for Billy were happening in Newcastle, I flat-out refused. A few days later, though, I started thinking about it properly. I realised I was letting the fear of being judged stop me from doing something I loved. I never got bullied for wearing a dress, either. I had so many brothers, all doing boxing. If anyone tried anything, I always had backup.
After I got the part, I had to move to London. When my mum dropped me off at the Billy house, she said she knew I’d be fine straight away. It reminded her of home: loads of kids, constant noise, organised chaos. We had house parents looking after us, drivers taking us to the theatre and teachers who home schooled us. I went from going to school to performing in front of 1,500 people in the West End each night – it was wild and surreal.
One of my biggest challenges with dance was music. It wasn’t really a thing in our house. There was so much noise all the time that we never really needed a soundtrack playing in the background. As a result, I didn’t have a natural sense of rhythm. Eventually, the producers arranged drumming lessons to help me hear the beat properly. It took work, but I wasn’t going to shy away from that. I’d seen my mum’s work ethic growing up, and that stayed with me. If something needed effort, I was going to give everything to it.
After Billy Elliot, there was the option of going to a stage school such as Sylvia Young, but I wanted to go home and live a normal life again. When I was back in Hartlepool, I joined Ruff Diamond, a dance group made up of local boys. We were just a group of lads giving it a go, but somehow we got on to the TV competition show Got to Dance in 2013, performing hip-hop routines. We made it all the way to the final as runners-up.
After that, I had a moment of reckoning. I felt a bit of self-doubt and started asking myself what I was actually doing, and where I wanted my life to go. For a while, I seriously considered working on the railway doing cable pulling. It would have been easy to go down that route, not go to drama school and never do any of this. Looking back, it’s mad how close I came to a completely different life.
Years later, I got a call about an Emmerdale audition. I needed to do a self-tape, but I was on holiday at the time. I remember thinking, “Right, let’s just get this done so I can go to the beach.” I put effort into it, but I did it quickly and then forgot about it completely. I’d done so many self-tapes by that point that I’d learned not to hold on to hope. When you’re between roles, you can send off 10 tapes and hear nothing back. That silence messes with your head. You start wondering whether everything you’ve done was just a fluke, whether you should be doing something else entirely. The industry demands persistence and a strong sense of self-worth, especially when you’re not working. Then, in a moment, everything can change. Seven weeks later, Emmerdale called and asked me to come to Leeds. I did a screen test on Thursday, moved there on Sunday, and started work on Monday.
Emmerdale reaches millions of people every night. The audience becomes incredibly familiar with you – so familiar that they feel like they know you personally. I’d be walking down the street and people would say, “Oh hi, Nicky!” You get so used to it, you almost go along with it.
One of the best parts of getting Emmerdale was knowing it was my Nana Dot’s favourite programme, along with Vera. I’ve managed to work on both now. It feels like a pattern – if Nana likes the show, I end up on it. The same goes for Strictly.
I’m 30 now, but I feel like a kid again. Dancing nine hours a day, six days a week on Strictly really gave me a new lease of life. It lifted me emotionally and physically. Every week I convinced myself I wouldn’t get where I needed to be by Saturday. I’d say I felt stiff, that I looked daft, that I couldn’t move properly. Katya [Jones, his dance partner] always reminded me to look back at the week before and trust the process. You always get through it.
If the 11-year-old version of me who auditioned for Billy Elliot could see where I am now, he’d be grateful I kept going. It hasn’t been easy. There were plenty of moments where I could have chosen not to do the scary thing and missed out on something great. And I can still feel the same buzz and energy I had back then. That’s something I never want to lose.
