Coronation Street’s Sair Khan has been speaking about how life will change for the Nazir family after Kal’s death.

Sair plays Alya Nazir, whose father Kal (Jimi Mistry) was killed in the Victoria Court fire on Thursday night’s episode of the ITV soap.

Asked by Digital Spy how Alya would cope, she said: “In a nutshell, not very well! It’s such a massive thing to lose a parent and she has lost both of them now, so you’ll definitely see how that impacts Alya in every single aspect of her life.

Coronation Street
Jimi Mistry played Kal Nazir (ITV)

“You’ll see how it affects her relationships, her faith, her work, her friendships – everything that she’s going to lose control of in a pretty bad way.”

She went on: “The Nazir family probably think that Alya is going to be the one who keeps them all together. They expect her to be that support network for everyone, but she can’t do that at the moment.

“I think the grief is too much for Alya, so she doesn’t deal with it in the way she expects to. She can’t be there for her family in the way that she wants to be there.”

Coronation Street
Kal (Jimi Mistry) proposed to Leanne (Jane Danson) shortly before dying (ITV)

Sair added that the Nazir family would stay close to Leanne Tilsley, who Kal had just proposed to: “They all know that Kal wanted to propose to Leanne and make her part of the family. As Kal wanted to spend the rest of his life with Leanne, it’s important to the Nazirs to make her part of the family. If that was one of Kal’s last wishes, then of course they want to honour that.”

Talking about Kal’s funeral scenes, she said: “There’s a lot of tears from everybody. With the flowers and everyone dressed for a funeral, it makes it feel so real when you film it. Obviously we’re telling a story, but it amplifies it tenfold and it seems real. We really felt the tears and the emotions.

Coronation Street
The Nazir family, including Zeedan (Qasim Akhatar), will find it difficult to deal with Kal’s death (ITV)

“You form such a close bond with the people that you work with a lot. Jimi has been there since the beginning for me and we hang out together too, so it’s been really sad seeing him go.

“I watched a preview of Jimi’s final episode with a few other workmates and I’m not going to lie, I had a bit of a tear in my eye! It was quite emotional saying goodbye to the character as well as a mate.”