Ricky Whittle

Ricky Whittle was born in Oldham near Manchester in the North of England. His father Harry Whittle was in the RAF which involved travelling to different RAF bases around the world. So Ricky never settled in one country for longer than 3 years. A keen sportsman, Ricky excelled in various sports representing his country at youth level in football, rugby, American football and athletics.

After being scouted by both Arsenal and Celtic football clubs, an injury forced Ricky to pursue a Law degree with Criminology at Southampton University for 4 years, in case of injury in the future. Here he began modelling, becoming the face of a Reebok campaign in 2000.

After a successful audition and recall for the lead character in Sky One's "Dream Team", Ricky left university to pursue an acting career. After two action-packed seasons as Dream Team's "bad boy" Ryan Naysmith, Ricky appeared as a guest character on BBC One's "Holby City", where he played his first gay character, David Richards.

Sadly, after breaking his leg in a freak accident, seven operations meant Ricky was bed bound for a few months and was told he would never run again and would be lucky to walk without limping.

However, Ricky returned to "Dream Team" and a new storyline was written in which his character broke his leg, allowing him to recover on the show as ladies man Ryan. After receiving strength and support from hundreds of fan mails wishing him a quick recovery, Ricky has now completed his rehabilitation and is back playing full contact football, proving the doctors wrong.

Last year Ricky showed off his amazing dance skills in Strictly Come Dancing the UK version of Dancing with the Stars. He made it through to the final but was just pipped to the post when he lost out to Chris Hollins.

Boy oh boy can this guy move his hips




Ricky has been a permanant cast member of the British drama Hollyoaks playing Calvin Valentine since 2006. Calvin's last scenes are now being shown on C4 in the UK.




In a recent interview when asked about his dream role in the future Ricky said: "There's loads of good things out there. I'd love to get involved in all the Twilights or the True Bloods. I'd love to play something animalistic.

"Or the opposite, something quite geeky or camp or something. I want to do something physical where I have to change the way I walk, the way I stand.

"Calvin (Valentine, his soap character) has been very down the line, the character I played in Dream Team was very down the line, I'd like to do something extreme."

And Ricky is even happy to lose his TV pin-up tag - which has grown up from him playing hunky ex-policeman Calvin and showing off his chest as a contestant in Strictly Come Dancing.

When asked if he would be pleased with an extreme change of character, he said: "Yeah, something like a vampire or werewolf or even a psycho. Get me to grow a beard. rough me up a bit, have me smacking people about and have me doing something horrible and mean, that people look at and go 'he's horrible. I hate him'.

"Or go the other way and give me some glasses and some sort of limp or someone very weak, where I'm bullied all the time and beaten. Something gritty, dark or just challenging. Straight down the middle is lovely but I'd like to be challenged at work and be able to handle that."

Ricky will be bringing out his first solo calander for 2011 and said recently

"I put on Twitter 'do you have any preferences?', and I got back some very rude ones which won't be going into the calendar, but they're very imaginative," he said.

"I've got some great ones, black and white shots, suits, topless, some stuff in bed, intense clinches with a woman - they want her to be treated mean to be kept keen. I've had some great ideas, I'm gonna take them all on board, and definitely going to do a few of them."

Thats one calander I will definately be checking out.

You can follow Rick @MrRickyWhittle