Daniel Brocklebank

Daniel Brocklebank is a British actor, best known for portraying the roles of Ivan Jones in the ITV soap opera Emmerdale (2005–2006), and Billy Mayhew in ITV's other long-running soap Coronation Street (2014–present). He is also known for his performance in the films Shakespeare in Love (1998), and The Hole (2001).

Career
From 1994, Brocklebank has starred in various TV programmes such as Down to Earth (BBC), Born and Bred (BBC), Ed Stone is Dead (BBC 3/Channel 4), Casualty (BBC), The Bill (ITV) and played Ivan Jones in ITV's Emmerdale between the beginning of 2005 to the end of 2006. Other TV credits include The Crazy World of Captain Llama, Fair City, Doctors and Waterloo Road. Brocklebank's other films include: The Hole starring opposite Keira Knightley and Thora Birch, The Hours opposite Meryl Streep, Another Life, Merlin, The Devil's Arithmetic and The Criminal with Eddie Izzard.

Brocklebank has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company in productions of As You Like It playing Silvius, Chiron in Titus Andronicus, Rowland in The Tamer Tamed and Ralph in Lord of the Flies. His other theatre credits include Martin Von Heilmann in The Curse of the Werewolf at the Union Theatre in London, John Rutherford in Rutherford and Son at the Royal Exchange in Manchester and John Honyman in Cressida for the Almeida Theatre in London's West End. Among other projects in 2008, Brocklebank starred in One Night In November, a new play by Alan Pollock directed by Hamish Glenn at the Belgrade Theatre, and in Big Love at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.

In 2009, he played Brother Jasper and Kaisa in His Dark Materials, a co-production between the Birmingham Rep and the West Yorkshire Playhouse. In 2009, he completed filming Release, a British feature film, written by Christian Martin and Darren Flaxstone of FAQ's LTD, in which he plays the lead role of Father Jack Gillie. In 2010, Brocklebank starred in one of three new dark tales Little Deaths directed by Andrew Parkinson.

In December 2014, he joined the cast of Coronation Street as Billy Mayhew, the new vicar at Emily Bishop's parish, St. Mary's, and began dating the barman Sean Tully. He appears as Carl Saunders in the second (2014) and third (2015) series of the BBC's WPC 56. Brocklebank has played roles in other films such as Admiral; Soft Lad, and Native.

Personal life
Brocklebank is gay. In a 2021 interview with Attitude, Brocklebank said, "I pretend for a living, I didn't want to pretend in my private life. When you spend your life on screen, it's important to hold on to the bits that are real. Who I am in my real life should bear no relevance to what I play on screen [...] I remember my management in Los Angeles trying to convince me not to come out because they said it would affect work – and it did [...] I stopped being screen-tested for the heterosexual male leads, and I was either the gay best friend or the character parts."

Theatre

 * Lord of the Flies (Ralph) (1995) RSC
 * Mensch Mier (Ludwig) (1996) Leicester Haymarket
 * The Tamer Tamed (Rowland) (2003–2004) RSC
 * Titus Andronicus (Chiron) (2003) RSC
 * As you like it (Silvius) (2003) RSC
 * Cressida (John Honyman) (2000) Almeida in the West End
 * His Dark Materials (Brother Jasper) (2009) Birmingham Rep