Few viewers could have failed to be moved – many to tears – by the “silent dance” performed by Rose Ayling-Ellis in the 2021 series of Strictly Come Dancing. Hailed as the show’s “greatest ever performance”, when the music stopped and she continued to dance with her professional dance partner in poignant silence, it simultaneously paid respect and raised awareness of the deaf community.
Which is what Ayling-Ellis has been doing ever since. Four years after scooping the trophy, she’s still on a winning streak – the first deaf contestant not only to appear on Strictly but to win it, the 30-year-old actor’s series of firsts also include being the first deaf person to host live sports coverage on British TV (as a presenter for Channel 4’s coverage of the 2024 Paralympics), the first person to work with a major toy company to produce a doll with a hearing aid (Barbie, in 2022) and the first person to sign a Bedtime Story on CBeebies. Her first book, Marvellous Messages, was published in March, part of a ten-book deal that will deepen her advocacy for the deaf community while educating those of us who can hear. Although “educating” sounds too preachy for a person who’d rather entertain and enlighten.
With lip-reading and BSL (British Sign Language) as her co-stars, Ayling-Ellis has just notched up another first, playing the lead in Code of Silence, a tense new ITV drama in which her deafness plays a starring role. Written by Catherine Moulton, who has been partially deaf since childhood, the police drama centres on Alison Brooks, a deaf woman who’s plucked out of working in a police canteen and recruited to lip-read as part of a surveillance operation hoping to thwart a gang planning a dangerous heist.
Ayling-Ellis committed to the role after being shown an outline of the story, encouraged by its ground-breaking format. “So when I wrote the script, I knew I was writing for Rose, which was brilliant, because some of her personality, energy and drive worked its way into Alison,” smiles Moulton. “Then we took it as a package to ITV – my script, and Rose playing the lead.”
“Normally, when you get a script about lip-reading, it can make you feel a bit on edge,” she adds, explaining that depictions aren’t always realistic. “But the fact that this one captured how hard lip-reading is, and how it’s like a puzzle, and [showed] how you work it out, really drew me to it.”
“We’ve never done anything like that before,” says Ayling-Ellis, explaining that she wanted to capture the process of deduction that deaf people have to go through, given that some words look the same when spoken. “That’s what lip-reading is. For example, ‘elephants’, ‘colourful’ and ‘I love you’ have the exact same patterns.”
It’s one of many elements of a show that places deaf and hearing-impaired people front and centre, reminding everyone of how the world is through their eyes. In one scene, a meeting takes place where the speaker is out of eyeshot, forcing Alison to ask a stranger what’s going on. “Those scenes came quite naturally, because those are things that we experience all the time – being at a school assembly or a play, and too far away [to lip-read],” says Moulton. “It’s so frustrating, but it’s part of our lives.”
“There’s a famous saying, ‘I’m disabled because the world disabled me’. What makes this script and plot so exciting is how Alison plays with that to her advantage. Everyone will assume she’s ‘just’ a deaf girl. It happens to me a lot. I have people talking about really uncomfortable situations in front of me, assuming I won’t hear them.”
Brought up in Hythe on the Kent coast, Ayling-Ellis’s hospital worker mum and surveyor dad found out she was deaf when she was 18 months old, after she “failed” a hearing test. It was presented as a problem that needed fixing. Her parents’ decision, controversial at the time, to teach their daughter BSL (some professionals claim it can delay speech) is covered movingly in her 2023 documentary, Signs for Change. “Sign language is brilliant, but it needs to be made more accessible,” she says. “Medical services need to think about deaf people in relation to mental health. Domestic abuse helplines as well. How are people going to call on the phone?” Given that an estimated one in two deaf people have mental health issues, it’s an urgent point.
After a film-making weekend organised by the National Deaf Children’s Society sparked a love of performing as a teen, she was encouraged to join a deaf youth theatre group in London, and kept her passion alive while at university in Rochester. A deaf actors’ Facebook group led to a partin Casualty, as well as other small parts, which eventually led to her getting an agent, and winning the part of Frankie in EastEnders, which she played for two years. “It was great training for me, because it made me learn how to hit my marks, how to get things [done] quickly, because they don’t have time. If you make a mistake, that’s it.”
Davies recently revealed that the role wasn’t originally written for a deaf actress, but that he incorporated feedback from Ayling-Ellis during script development. In the future, would she prefer to play deaf characters with storylines written to reflect this, or roles without reference to being deaf? “I don’t have that privilege,” she says. “No matter what I do, it’s going to be deaf because it’s in my accent, my wearing my hearing aid and in the way I communicate. That can never be taken away.”
“There’s more realisation that a disabled story can be entertainment, and not be preachy,” adds Ayling-Ellis.
Strictly fans may be aware that Ayling-Ellis can sometimes hear the beat of a song: still, I wonder whether it’s insensitive to ask whether music has a role in her life. “Oh, I love music,” she beams. “I have Bluetooth in my hearing aid that I connect to my phone. I can control it so that there’s no background noise – I can’t hear anybody, and then I put my music on, whack it up really loud so I can’t hear the traffic or people shouting – just music. It’s great. Hearing people don’t have that luxury.”
Despite – or maybe because – I’m the world’s number one crisp fan, I think I’ve misheard her. A crisps party? “I love crisps,” she beams. “I wrapped the whole venue in foil, so it would look like the inside of a crisp packet. And everyone had to dress up as a different crisp. One friend put a spacesuit on – Space Raiders – and another’s got lovely long ginger hair. She had an orange dress and hat on, fluffed up her hair and sprayed it with hairspray, and she was a Wotsit.”
Like music, fashion isn’t a subject she’s often asked about, despite having studied it at university. Today, she’s wearing a black top, black trousers and a new pair of black slingbacks. “This year I’m really trying not to buy new clothes, and I’ve been doing really well until these shoes came along,” she laughs. For fancier occasions, she loves Chloé and Stella McCartney. “I wore her to collect my MBE. I love her clothes, and she’s a really smart businesswoman.”
Having achieved so much already, it must be tiresome to be asked what she wants to achieve next. “I’ve got no job at the moment, which is actually quite nice,” she smiles. “So I think I’m going to enjoy the quietness.”
She should enjoy it while she can. Her world might be quiet, but her professional life is destined to be anything but.
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