21:03, 30 Apr 2026

Coronation Street star Pauline McLynn has teased that her character Maggie Driscoll could appear “very dead” by the end of the week. The actress, 63, arrived as the no-nonsense Irish matriarch on the world’s longest-running TV soap towards the end of last year, where she and her family took over the famed Rovers Return Inn.

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Never short of drama, Maggie has made an enemy out of teacher Megan Walsh (Beth Nixon), who has been having an illicit relationship with her teenage grandson Will, and the pair had an epic showdown that aired at the end of Thursday night’s episode.

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The programme has been through numerous format changes in the last few years that have taken it away from the traditional linear exploration of everyday life on a Manchester backstreet, and earlier this year, a flashback episode set in Ireland revealed that Maggie had killed her husband Alan years ago by pushing him down the stairs.

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In another radical shakeup, viewers are now in the middle of a much-hyped Murder Week. A flashforward earlier this year that confirmed that either Maggie or Megan, or one of her fellow antagonists- Carl Webster (Jonathan Howard), Theo Silverton (James Cartwright), or Jodie Ramsey (Olivia Frances Brown) would be killed off in scenes that are playing out this week, with each episode detailing the same day’s events but from each character’s point of view.

Now, Pauline has teased that her character’s killer past could come back to haunt her, and she may have to “pay” for her historic actions after crossing paths with Megan.

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She said: “I do seem very dead at the end of the week. Assume nothing. You might be being fed one thing which is true, but it could be more than one. It’s also brilliantly clear that any one of the five could be a killer, whether or not they’ve killed the person you believe to be dead or not. It’s brilliantly seeded in. There is a justice in Coronation Street, if you do a crime, you have to pay the price.”

At the end of Thursday’s episode, released early on ITVX, viewers saw an enraged Maggie follow Megan up a flight of stairs and shut the door.

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Speaking about the suspense-filled scene, Pauline said: “It was a tragic accident when Maggie’s husband fell so tragically down the stairs and died [laughs]. The line had been put in – I can, [Maggie has] done it before. At this stage, I don’t mind if people do think it’s murder. She’s so far put to the pin of her collar, why not. We haven’t seen whether I do push her down the stairs!”

Pauline, famed for her role as Mrs Doyle in Father Ted, also admitted that she was made aware of the intention to kill Maggie off when she first signed up to appear on the show. She said: “I will say this, when I joined the show, I was told that the plan for the character was to kill her. So we shall see! I think you’ll find when you watch all of the five stories that it’s very possible more than one person is dead, that’s another thing I will say.”

Coronation Street boss Kate Brooks said of the big week: “It was a very complicated storylining process! I did lose a bit of sleep and my hair went a little bit greyer. Usually in a murder week you’ve got one victim, then the suspects – we had five potential suspects had to make sure all the stories aligned, made sense and they were all getting to the right place and coming together.”

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Coronation Street airs weeknights at 8:30pm on ITV1 and ITV X.

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