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Neighbours' Ben Nicholas unrecognisable 15 years after leaving the show
Ben Nicholas was just 15 years old when he played Scott "Stingray" Timmins from 2004 to 2007 on Neighbours. The mischief-making younger cousin of Toady made a splash in the soap after being arrested for streaking at a footy match.
In fact, that was also Ben's fondest memory of the show, "running stark naked across Optus Oval in the middle of winter!"
"They gave me a nice little modesty patch which I wore, which was attached to a scarf so it didn't blow in the wind and protected me from the elements," he recalled on the Aimee Craig podcast in 2018.
"[He's] a bit of a fool like Toadie was – he's full of energy and rubs people up the wrong way, but he has a certain charm about him too," Ben told Inside Soap in 2004.
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Ben even earned a nomination for Most Popular New Male Talent at the 2005 Logie Awards.
The actor landed the role after a casting director saw him in a stage show in Melbourne and asked him to audition.
"I grew up singing, dancing and acting so I spent my childhood doing musical theatre," Ben told Tinsel and Tap Shoes in 2015.
But all good things must come to an end and when Ben decided he wanted to leave the show, his character died from a brain aneurysm.
While he was on the soap for three years, what he missed most when he left was the messing around with his best mates, actors Damien Bodie (who played his brother Dylan) and Kyal Marsh (who played Boyd) "The three of us were pretty close and used to get up to shenanigans outside of work and on set."
The trio are still in touch today!
Since then, Ben has kept working in showbiz, dividing his time between stage and the small screen, but he also diversified into writing and producing. He can most recently be seen in the Rebecca Gibney and Anthony LaPaglia miniseries Halifax: Retribution as a truck driver.
But it's his personal life that has really changed. Two years ago he married his long-term girlfriend Stephanie Lilja and now they are expecting their first child together.
So with Neighbours coming to an end, it doesn't look like we'll get a chance to see Ben as Stingray in the soap again.
"Sadly I did die and my body was cremated, so apart from waking up from a dream... I don't think there's much chance of me coming back," Ben jokingly told Digital Spy.
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