The Best Soap Actors of All-Time

Ahead of EastEnders 40th anniversary, we’ve ranked the best soap actors ever – with one Coronation Street star coming out on top.

As EastEnders marks 40 years since its debut episode aired in February 1985, the soap’s greatest actor of all time has been unveiled.

New research by online casino Betway delves into a range of metrics, such as positive sentiment scores, number of social media followers and Google search volume, to reveal the actors topping the list. 

Jack P. Shepherd, who has portrayed David Platt on Coronation Street since 2000, claimed the top spot in the research. He emerged as the winner with an impressive positive sentiment score of 57.1 – alongside a staggering 25,418,077 Google searches.

While playing the role of Gail Platt’s son, Jack has been at the centre of many gripping storylines over the years – including serial killer Richard Hillman driving him, his mum Gail, sister Sarah, and baby Bethany into the canal.

It was a close call, but Billy Mitchell actor Perry Fenwick and Ian Beale star Adam Woodyatt secured second and third place retrospectively, beating Steve McFadden – who has starred as Phil Mitchell since first appearing in February 1990. 

Perry came out on top with a higher number of Google searches than Jack with 26,483,126, but had a lower sentiment score. Meanwhile, Adam – who starred in an explosive storyline this Christmas alongside co-star Michelle Collins – had a sentiment score of 55.7, but had a lower number of searches.

As one of the longest-running stars on the BBC soap, Steve racked up an impressive 20,220,648 searches overall, though his sentiment score landed at 53. His on-screen brother, Ross Kemp – best known as Grant Mitchell – also earned a spot on the list.

Martin Kemp, who portrayed the character of Steve Owen, had a higher score of 57.5, but the actor with the highest score overall was Coronation Street’s ultimate villain Richard Hillman, played by Brian Capron. 

Meanwhile, Corrie’s Steve MacDonald star Simon Gregson had a substantially high sentiment score of 58, and the only Emmerdale star to make the top 12 was John Middleton after playing the role of Ashley Thomas from 1996 to 2017, before returning for two episodes in 2018. 

Methodology

The study used an index methodology, using the following metrics and sources:

• The list of actors was gathered from any actor who had won or been nominated for the British Soap Award for Best Actor and was in one of EastEnders, Coronation Street, Emmerdale or Hollyoaks. Seedlist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Soap_Award_for_Best_Actor

• Sentiment Score (Out of 100) – Reddit comments from their respective SOAP subreddit for both their character name and real names. A score out of 100 was given to describe how positive and negative these comments were. A total Sentiment score for this person was then given based on the number of comments they got based on if they came from their character or them as an actor. 

• Google Search Volume (Role) – Google Trends – searching for the search volume of that character name, to give everyone a fair period as we had many different characters over a long time we used the period from 2004 till present.

• Score – This then averaged the normalised Google Search Volume (50-100) with the sentiment score. The character with the highest score would be the one talked about most positively and have the highest Google search volume over the longest time possible.

• Research carried out by Betway on 14/01/25