Fangirl To Girlfriend! - Shorty Star Reid's Sweet Romance

The actor is all smiles with lovely Leah

- Fleur Mealing

Even though Reid Walker has played Harry Warner on Shortland Street since the age of nine, it was only in 2017 that he became known worldwide.

The infamous line “Please tell me that is not your penis!”, uttered by his on-screen dad Michael Galvin, made it all the way to the US, with Alec Baldwin and Jimmy Kimmel re-enacting the scene. But it wasn’t without its embarrassment, as Reid, 18, found on his first date with girlfriend Leah.

“We were just walking through Sylvia Park mall when someone yelled the line out at me. It certainly was a way to make the first date memorable, but thankfully, it was more funny than awkward. Here we are over a year later – so it can’t have scared Leah off too much!” laughs Reid.

Acting on TVNZ 2’s Shortland Street for almost a decade might have given Reid a large following, but his biggest fan by far is his girlfriend Leah Pereira, also 18.

The gorgeous uni student was an avid watcher of the beloved Kiwi soap before she met the star, so when Reid turned up on her doorstep as a friend’s date for a school ball, she was more than a little taken aback.

“I remember I made an absolute fool of myself,” the teaching student confesses. “I said, ‘Hi, I’m Leah. I’m the one who watches Shortland Street,’ and then I thought, ‘Why did I say that?!’ I bolted. It was so terrible.”