Former EastEnders star Katie Jarvis, who played fiery Hayley Slater from

2018 to 2019, has swapped the screen for a regular job working in a garage. The

move comes after a racially aggravated brawl almost ended her career back in

2020, which resulted in a sentence of 200 hours of unpaid work and a 60-hour rehabilitation order. Despite the setback, the 33-year-old briefly returned to acting in Rise of the Footsoldier: Origins as Donna, but has since focused on living a quieter life and raising her two children. Following the end of her EastEnders stint and grieving for late family members at the time, Katie said she decided to take three months away from the spotlight and went on to secure a job as a security guard in B&M. Explaining why she worked in the public place, she shared: “Rather than sit at home and be depressed and miserable, I thought I’ll go and work with my sister Becky. “So, we both worked at the same place in security, she got me in there, then it turns out a week later, obviously word has got out, and about a week later my phone starts ringing [from the press].

Then, these pictures come out of me the next day, the front of the papers, of me walking into work.” At the time, Katie felt hounded by criticism for having a regular job and claimed she felt she was damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t work. She went on to say: “Up until EastEnders, I never had no bad publicity, no drama, I never had no s**t at all. I go on EastEnders and everyone jumps on everything, everyone’s up your a**e, everyone wants to be in your business, everyone thinks that they know you, it just changes the whole dynamic completely.

“You can’t win, it doesn’t matter what you do, you can’t win,” she lamented during her chat on the Criminal Connection podcast. Katie now earns her keep at a garage and has held numerous other normaljobs in between acting. “I’ve done a railway engineering course, I’m qualified in nails, I’ve done all sorts, the list is never ending,” she spilled. On her current job, she added: “I’ve pulled back a little bit now, the last film I done was The Rise of the Footsolider, I was over the moon to play Donna. “I’m working at the moment, a normal job, I’ve pulled back from the filming a little bit. I’m working at a garage. “Like what Hayley was in EastEnders, I love it. I love the people I work with as well, it’s great.” Despite previously hopping from one job to another, Katie said she is “quite happy and settled” at her current job and has no plans to leave, seemingly ruling out a return to the soap.