In 2024, Olly Rix’s life changed when he brought a little dog called Nellie home.

The actor has been playing Flynn Byron in BBC One’s Casualty since March of this year. It’s a busy life Olly leads working in the continuing drama and looking after young Nellie but recently, a rare day off from filming saw him take a trip to The Dogs Trust in Cardiff.

Olly adores dogs, and could wait to learn more about the work the charity does.

The Dogs Trust is an animal welfare charity and humane society that specialises in the well-being of dogs. It’s the largest dog welfare charity in the UK and cares for over 15,000 animals each year.

The charity’s primary objective is to protect all dogs in the UK and elsewhere from cruelty and suffering. It focuses on the rehoming and rehabilitation of dogs who have been abandoned or given up by their owners.

I’m a dog lover but I’ve never visited a rehoming centre before. As a result, it left me wondering if Olly’s first emotion when he entered The Dogs Trust in Cardiff – a place home to unwanted dogs – was sadness.

In our latest chat he reassured me that wasn’t the case, as a dedicated team of people work hard to create an environment full of hope, love and celebratory moments.

‘It was amazing. They talked me through the whole thing. How they work as an organisation and across the country, to how they work in that specific locality and in Cardiff’, he said.

‘I met various different dogs who all have different back stories, some absolutely heartbreaking, some actually oddly sort of uplifting. I met puppies who have just been born. They didn’t have any kind of story but they were absolutely beautiful.

‘They do so much work and it’s so variable. It isn’t really a sort of gut wrenchingly heartbreaking day. There’s such a beautiful energy there. The people involved are just so humbling to be around. They are so selfless, and so focused on all the dogs there. It’s such a tonic to the b******t of everyday life, to just go and be around some thoughtful, wonderful souls.’

He smiled: ‘They even named a dog after me! He was about a year old, a chocolate Labrador and they called him Olly, which was just so lovely. I got to meet him and play with him, it was a really special time.

‘They just don’t give up. I think what becomes so apparent so quickly is that there’s a sort of uplifting nature to the entire organisation. It hits you in the face within seconds of walking in the door, because everything there, every sort of little soul there, is going to be okay.

‘It’s going to be a different process and a different journey for each one of them, and some of them will have a really tough time and they might have come from, you know, really horrendous circumstances, and they might need a lot of sort of medical care and intervention that will make the adoption process quite complicated. But even then, in the most extreme cases, they don’t stop, they just see it through.’

After spending the day at the centre, Olly headed home to look after his own furry best friend Nellie. The pooch is still young, which means Olly has recently had to battle through what everyone faces becoming owner to a new dog: sleepless nights, toilet training, and chaotic mishaps.

It’s certainly not easy but Olly wouldn’t change it for the world. He told me that Nellie arrived in his life at a pivotal time for him, as he was ‘having a bit of a tough time’ and needed something to focus on.

‘I think dogs can irrevocably change anybody’s life’, he noted.

‘Little Nellie came along at a time when I was having a bit of a tough time, sort of personally and professionally, and it was just a bit of a tricky patch. It happens in life sometimes, and she came along in a moment when I needed to take my own attention away from myself, and not sort of become overly introspective or overly self centred, I suppose. It was really valuable and helped.

‘So many people find that if they suffer from depression, for example, a dog is a perfect way of taking their attention into a different realm that is maybe more manageable for them. It allows them to see a bit of light in their life, and allows them to care for something external to themselves. That wasn’t my situation, but it was something that I discussed