The defining Toadie moments fans will never forget as Neighbours legend quits after 30 years

 

After 30 years of drama, disaster and dead wives, Neighbours’ Toadiee Rebecchi is set to wave goodbye to Ramsay Street for good. 

Actor Ryan Moloney has announced he has quit his role on the Aussie soap, with his exit scenes expected to air in the coming months. 

Arriving in Erinsborough in 1994, Jarrod ‘Toadie’ Rebecchi was brought in for a short guest-stint as Billy Kennedy’s (Jesse Spencer) best friend, but made such an impression that soap bosses kept him on, and even introduced the rest of the Rebecchi clan (including his legendary mother Angie, played by Lesley Baker). 

In the years since, Toadie has been at the heart of plenty of the soap’s “unmissable drama”, as he’s gone from teenage tearaway to loveable loyal lawyer. 

Driving Dee off a cliff

Undoubtedly one of the most iconic Neighbours episodes of all time saw Toadie tie the knot with his former housemate-turned girlfriend Dione ‘Dee’ Bliss (Madeleine West) in 2003. 

However, their happiness was short lived when Toadie ended up driving their wedding car off a cliff and into the ocean, with Dee seemingly meeting a watery grave. 

We say ‘seemingly’, because 13 years later, there was a massive twist in this tragic tale that no-one saw coming… 

The ‘Fake Dee’ saga 

Neighbours turned the ‘back from the dead’ soap trope on its head when ‘Dee’ turned up on Toadie’s doorstep in 2017, and it was revealed she was a con-woman called Andrea Somers (also played by Madeline West), who was posing as Toadie’s late wife to scam him out of thousands. 

Sadly for Toadie, he didn’t realise this until he’d already cheated on wife Sonya (Eve Morey) with ‘Dee’ – which Sonya also had the misfortune of witnessing via Skype – and their liaison resulting in son Hugo. 

Andrea’s mother Heather later arrived in Erinsborough posing as a nanny called Alice, hellbent on killing Sonya in order to bring Andrea – who at this point was on a psychiatric ward having suffered a mental breakdown – and Toadie together.

But then the actual real Dee turned up, with a convoluted, but camp, piece of soap-retcon revealing her to be Andrea’s long-lost sister who she was separated from at birth in a convent, leaving Toadie – and fans – stunned.

Toadie and Sonya’s two-hander 

Real ones know that, as beloved of a character as Dee was back in the day, his second wife Sonya was the real love of Toadie’s life, with them being widely regarded as a young Karl and Susan Kennedy. 

However, the long-standing couple were cruelly ripped apart in 2019, when Sonya died of cervical cancer in a heartbreaking two-hander episode that followed the couple in her final hours. 

There were powerhouse performances from Ryan Moloney and Eve Morey, which earned Neighbours its first prestigious Logie Award nominations in four years. 

Wedding explosion 

Proving that Melanie Pearson (Lucinda Cowden) and Terese Willis (Rebekah Elmaloglou) really were dicing with death when they married Toadie in more recent years, his wedding day to Sonya in 2013 befell a similar fate to that of his nuptials to Dee, when an explosion tore through their celebrations at Lassiters. 

While Soya might have lived to tell the tale, a blow to the head and a serious bout of amnesia meant she could remember nothing of their day, and the couple also had to deal with wedding guests Pryia Kapoor (Menik Gooneratne) and Rhys Lawson (Ben Barber) losing their lives in the tragedy.  

The 90s mullet

Toadie’s hair basically became its own character after he joined the show, but his trademark mullet got the chop in 1999, with Lou Carpenter (Tom Oliver) getting to do the honours as part of a student radio station fundraiser. 

Toadie and Steph’s sham wedding

After Steph Scully (Carla Bonner) slept with her best mate Libby Kennedy’s (Kym Valentine) husband Dan Fitzgerald (Brett Tucker) in 2009, she fell pregnant and feared anyone finding out the awful truth. 

Confiding in best pal Toadie – who she’d previously jilted at the altar – he offered to pretend they’d rekindled their relationship, and tell people the baby was his to protect her secret.  

Having staged a wedding to make it more convincing, their lies were exposed in true ‘Sharongate’ fashion, when Paul Robinson (Stefan Dennish) played a recording of Steph telling Dan about the baby to a packed-out pub. 

Becoming a dad to Callum 

A planned 2008 storyline was set to see Toadie adopt a child from Indonesia, with producers later adapting the plot to see him take in young tearaway Callum Jones (Morgan Baker), whose grandmother was no longer capable of caring for him. 

As Toadie later embarked on a romance with their guide dog trainer Sonya Mitchell, the couple’s relationship was blown apart when it was revealed she was actually Callum’s biological mother, who’d abandoned him when she was a young adult battling addiction. 

Despite her deception, Sonya reconnected with Callum and rekindled her relationship with Toadie, with the trio going on to form a proper family unit, before welcoming new addition – baby Nell (then Scarlett Anderson) – in 2013. 

The House of Trouser

While the Vaga-Murphys might now call No 30 home, for a long period during the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was better known as the House of Trouser, where Toadie lived with other Ramsay Street bachelors Joel Samuels (Daniel Macpherson), Lance Wilkinson (Andrew Bibby), Connor O’Neill (Patrick Harvey), Stuart Parker (Blair McDonaugh) and of course, Bob the dog. 

From their love of wrestling, to running Bounce the bikini shop, there were always laughs and larks guaranteed with this line-up of loveable lads, who played a huge part in one of the golden eras in Neighbours history.  

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