Balvinder Sopal: From Suki Panesar in EastEnders to a Record-Breaking Strictly Run

For most viewers, Balvinder Sopal is Suki Panesar — the sharp, guarded and endlessly watchable matriarch who has run the Panesar family in EastEnders since January 2020. Then, in autumn 2025, she stepped away from Albert Square’s drama and into a very different kind of spotlight, reaching the semi-final of Strictly Come Dancing and making history along the way.

Searches for Balvinder Sopal tend to ask the same handful of questions: How old is she? Who does she play in EastEnders? Who was her Strictly partner, and how far did she get? What happened with her early injury on the show? And — because Suki’s love life is so dramatic on screen — who is her partner in real life?

This profile answers all of those questions, using only what has been reported by reputable broadcasters and what Sopal has said herself.

Quick facts

• Born: 4 December 1978, in Chatham, Kent
• Age: 47
• Raised: Gillingham, Kent — the eldest of four children
• Education: Theatre Studies with Media, University of Huddersfield
• Best known for: Suki Panesar (later Suki Panesar-Unwin) in EastEnders, since 2020
• Strictly Come Dancing: Series 23 contestant in 2025, partnered with Julian Caillon; eliminated in the semi-final

Early life in Kent

Balvinder Sopal was born on 4 December 1978 in Chatham, in the Medway towns of Kent, and was brought up in nearby Gillingham as the eldest of four children.

The BBC’s own Strictly biography describes a childhood full of imaginative games with her siblings, and a young Balvinder who had to persuade her parents to back her acting ambitions. That persuasion worked. She went on to study Theatre Studies with Media at the University of Huddersfield, building the formal training that would underpin a career lasting more than two decades.

Kent has remained home territory. In interviews around her Strictly run, Sopal spoke warmly about the support she received from the Medway towns, saying the response from her home area had overwhelmed her. Away from work, the BBC biography lists long walks in Kent, gardening and crochet among her interests — a notably calmer list than anything Suki Panesar would admit to.

A working actor long before Walford

Sopal’s EastEnders fame arrived relatively late, and it was earned the slow way: theatre, radio, guest roles and years of steady television work.

Theatre and radio beginnings

She made her professional stage debut in 2001, playing Bhelua in The Beautiful Violin at the Oldham Coliseum Theatre. A long list of stage productions followed, including Absent Friends, Relatively Speaking and The Tales of the Harrow.

Her screen debut came in the BBC series Kidhaar!, and from 2004 to 2010 she voiced Simran Kaur in Silver Street, the BBC Asian Network radio soap. Six years in a daily radio drama is an apprenticeship in itself — character, consistency and voice work, long before a television audience knew her face.

Other early screen credits included the BBC film White Girl (2008), in which she played Fatima, plus appearances in Coming Up, Five Days and Waterloo Road.

The soap years: Emmerdale, Coronation Street, Doctors and Hollyoaks

Yes — the reports are true. Before EastEnders, Sopal had already appeared in almost every other major British soap. Between 2009 and 2018 she built up guest and recurring roles across four of them:

• Emmerdale — She played three different characters across five episodes between 2009 and 2018: a legal aid solicitor, DC Graves and DC Khan.
• Coronation Street — She played P.C. Marks in four episodes, in 2013 and 2017.
• Doctors — She played Aafiyah Choudary in a 2018 episode.
• Hollyoaks — She played Liz, a social worker, in four episodes in 2018.
• Call the Midwife — Not a soap, but a notable guest role in the same period: Mumtaz Gani in series seven, in 2018.

It is an unusual CV. Most actors are lucky to appear in one of the big soaps; Sopal had worked in all of them before she was offered a regular role. What she had never had, until EastEnders, was a character of her own to build over years rather than episodes.

For another of the BBC’s most recognisable faces, see our profile of Naga Munchetty and her move from BBC Breakfast to Radio 5 Live.

Becoming Suki Panesar in EastEnders

Sopal’s casting as Suki Panesar was announced in December 2019, and the character made her first on-screen appearance on 27 January 2020.

Suki arrived in Walford as the mother of Kheerat, Jags, Vinny and Ash Panesar — the matriarch of the show’s first Sikh family, a businesswoman whose children already lived, as the show’s producers put it at the time, in the shadow of her power.

Suki’s biggest storylines

Few EastEnders characters have been given as much to do in six years. The storylines most widely reported include:

• The lie that launched her: Suki’s earliest plot saw her falsely claiming to have cancer to win sympathy and pull her estranged children closer — a deception that set the tone for a character who controlled people because she feared losing them.
• Jags and her guilt: Suki framed her son Jags for crimes committed by his brother Vinny. Jags was later killed in prison, leaving Suki carrying a guilt that softened and complicated the character considerably.
• An abusive marriage: Suki’s marriage to Nish Panesar, played by Navin Chowdhry, was portrayed as controlling and abusive, with Nish’s behaviour shaping much of Suki’s adult life and her fear of freedom.
• Suki and Eve: The relationship that changed everything. Suki’s growing attraction to Eve Unwin, played by Heather Peace, forced her to confront her own sexuality — and her earlier rejection of her daughter Ash’s bisexuality. Her coming-out storyline was widely praised for telling a later-life LGBTQ+ story within a British Asian family, without making culture itself the villain.
• The Six: At Christmas 2023, Suki was one of the six women at the centre of EastEnders’ long-running whodunnit, in which Linda Carter killed Keanu Taylor in The Queen Vic and the six women covered it up. The storyline ran for more than a year, with the secret repeatedly threatening Suki’s future with Eve.
• Marriage to Eve: After Nish’s final attempts to stop them, Suki and Eve married in a New Year’s Day wedding — reported as a first for the show — with the couple later known as the Panesar-Unwins.

Sopal has spoken about her input into how Suki was written, saying she wanted the character to keep her culture without becoming a stereotype, and for the Panesars to feel like real people woven into Walford life rather than a headline.

Critics noticed quickly. Inside Soap described Suki as reaching soap icon status in record time, and the awards followed: she won Best TV Character at the Asian Media Awards in 2022, and the storyline of Suki coming out to her family won Inspiring Storyline of the Year at the RadioTimes.com Soap Awards in 2024. Her partnership with Heather Peace has also been recognised repeatedly, including Best Soap Partnership honours, and you can read more in Radio Times’ coverage of her award win.

Strictly Come Dancing 2025: the run that would not end

In August 2025, Sopal was revealed — live from the EastEnders set on ITV’s Good Morning Britain — as a contestant in series 23 of Strictly Come Dancing. She was 46 when the series began, and she was clear from the start that this was a long-held ambition: she had wanted to do the show for years, and described combining it with EastEnders as the stuff of dreams.

Her professional partner

Sopal was partnered with professional dancer Julian Caillon. It proved to be one of the series’ defining partnerships — supportive, resilient, and, as the weeks went on, record-breaking. You can see how the pairing was presented at the start of the series in this Radio Times profile of Balvinder Sopal’s Strictly run.

What happened with her injury?

One of the most searched questions about Sopal’s Strictly run concerns an injury before the series had properly begun — and the short answer is that it did not stop her.

On only her second day of training, Sopal told followers that something had “popped” and that she was seeing a physiotherapist about tightness in her left hip and glute. She stressed that she could still walk and move. By the following day she had posted an update saying the hip and glute were “all good — just tight”, thanked people for their messages, and confirmed training had continued.

She went on to dance in the first live show as planned. It is worth stating plainly, because the story is sometimes retold more dramatically than it happened: this was an early training scare that was checked, managed, and did not remove her from the competition.

Five dance-offs, one record, and a semi-final exit

Sopal’s Strictly journey was not smooth — it was remarkable precisely because it kept nearly ending.

Week after week, she and Caillon landed in the bottom two. Week after week, the judges saved them. By surviving five dance-offs, the pair made Strictly history: no couple in the show’s 21-year history had survived that many and still been in the competition. Along the way her dancing visibly grew, with her Viennese Waltz during Musicals Week earning 35 points, her highest score of the series, and a standing ovation.

The run ended at the semi-final on 13 December 2025. Performing two dances — a Waltz and a Salsa — Sopal and Caillon finished bottom of the leaderboard and faced their sixth dance-off, this time against Amber Davies and Nikita Kuzmin. All four judges chose to save Davies, and Sopal left one week short of the final, as the tenth celebrity eliminated from the series.

Her farewell was gracious rather than bitter. She described the experience as her “yes year”, thanked Caillon for never letting her feel alone on the floor, and left with a record that may stand for some time.

“Strictly saved me”

The run meant more to Sopal than a competition result. Her mother died in early 2024, and in interviews with BBC Radio Kent after her elimination she described the previous year as very difficult, calling Strictly a healing experience that had arrived at exactly the right time. She said the show had changed how she thought about her body and what it could do, and that she had achieved something that had been on her bucket list for years.

That context helps explain why audiences warmed to her. This was not a trained dancer chasing a trophy; it was a 46-year-old actor, grieving her mother, learning something she had always wanted to learn — and refusing, five dance-offs in a row, to go home quietly.

Partner and private life: what is actually known

Because Suki’s on-screen relationships — first with Nish, then with Eve — are so central to EastEnders, searches for Balvinder Sopal’s “partner” or “husband” in real life are common.

Here is the honest answer: Sopal keeps her private life private. She has not named a partner in reputable interviews, and there is no verified public record of a spouse to report. Profiles that claim otherwise are generally recycling speculation, and this article will not invent one.

What can be said from her own public statements is about family rather than romance. She is the eldest of four siblings, remains close to her family in Kent, and spoke movingly and publicly about her mother — her self-described cheerleader — after her death in early 2024. Anything beyond that, she has chosen not to share, and that choice deserves to be respected rather than filled in with guesses.

Do not confuse the character with the actor: Suki Panesar-Unwin is married on screen to Eve. Balvinder Sopal, off screen, simply does not conduct her personal life in public.

What Balvinder Sopal did next

Sopal returned to EastEnders as Suki, with the character’s story continuing into new chapters for the Panesar-Unwin family. More than five years after arriving as a guest star who had appeared in everyone else’s soap, she is now one of the central figures in her own — an award-winning lead in EastEnders, and, after 2025, a Strictly semi-finalist with a record no other contestant has matched.

For an actor whose big break came at 41, after two decades of theatre, radio and four-episode guest spots, it is a career arc worth more than the usual celebrity profile clichés. Balvinder Sopal did not arrive overnight. She arrived prepared.

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