Hassan: I'm happy in Hollyoaks

Karen Hassan has said she's keen to stay in Hollyoaks for the foreseeable future.

The Northern Irish actress joined the Channel 4 soap in 2010 as Lynsey Nolan - but admitted she misses her family and friends.

She revealed: "Everybody's always at the end of a phonecall and my friends were over at the weekend - and my mum's coming over in the next few weeks. I miss the closeness and the familiarity of home but I feel settled here in Liverpool and it's my home for the foreseeable future."

Karen added: "The whole thing for me has been a whirlwind. I always say when you start on Hollyoaks you don't just get a job, you get a whole lifestyle."

The actress has been back on home soil in Belfast filming BBC crime drama The Fall, which also stars Hollyoaks' Emmett Scanlan and Bronagh Waugh.

"I've wanted to come back to Belfast and do something for a while, whether it was a play or a film or a series like The Fall and it was lovely to fly back to Belfast and I'm able to stay at my mum's house while I'm filming," she said.

"It's funny - obviously I was over the moon because me, Emmett and Bronagh are all in Hollyoaks together playing kind of a family so it was amazing for us finding out the news kind of consecutively that we'd got parts in The Fall.

"We're all over the moon that we all ended up in it but randomly our paths don't really cross that much in The Fall. I was filming a scene with Emmett yesterday but our characters didn't know each other."