Rose Ayling-Ellis on Code of Silence and how "a lot of coffee" helped with intense Doctor Who role

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.

Preachy is the last thing that Ayling-Ellis is, which is something that becomes apparent as soon as we start chatting in the tasteful, plump-cushioned environs of a five-star London hotel. “French,” she says definitively, when I ask her what the hardest accent is to lip-read. “They talk with their teeth together. Men are generally harder to lip-read because they mumble too much. Look me in the eyes and open your mouth more, please!”

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.

Moulton had the idea for the script after having lip-reading lessons to improve the skills she’d taught herself as a child. “That’s when I learnt that only between 30 and 40 per cent of speech is actually visible on your lips – everything else is complicated guesswork. So you’re looking at the person’s body language, the situation you’re in and what you know about them. It made me think of it as a big puzzle. With lip-reading, you’re putting together clues and then coming up with an answer. Which felt perfect for a detective show.”

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.”

Ayling-Ellis had zero doubts about taking the role. “I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time. I’ve been acting for about 13 years. When I’ve done theatre, I’ve always had a small role and it used to frustrate me, because I feel there is a story out there that’s not being told. I needed to show everyone I can do this.

“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.”

For the viewer, this means watching subtitles form on screen slowly, letter by letter, at a pace designed to echo that of a lip-reader figuring out the words they’re interpreting. “It took us a long time to work that out,” says Moulton. “There was a lot of back and forth, and Rose had a lot of input.”

“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.”

“Certain words look the same, like ‘leaf’ and ‘leave’,” Moulton adds. “Also ‘police’ and ‘please’ have the same pattern, so there is always room for doubt. You could say, ‘Oh, he wasn’t saying that,’ which is why sometimes you can’t rely on that evidence in court.”

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.”

The plot also emphasises Alison’s quick-witted intelligence, in a way that will feel vindicating to any deaf or hearing-impaired person who’s experienced the hurt and frustration of deafness and slowness being conflated. “There’s a lot of prejudice,” sighs Ayling-Ellis. “You’re slow because of the environment that you’re in. Everyone else is making it slow – it’s not yourself. That’s why I say I love being deaf. There’s no problem with being deaf at all. It’s my environment that makes it harder for me to be deaf.

“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 part in 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.”

As well as appearing in the BBC1 thriller Reunion this year, she’s also joined the Whoniverse, with Russell T Davies describing her role in last month’s story The Well as “an astonishing performance of terror, anger and bravery in one of the most frightening episodes we’ve ever made”. “It was really fun, and great for building up my acting skills,” she says of the experience, adding that “a lot of coffee” helped her to act suitably jittery and scared.

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.”

She and Moulton are optimistic that deaf representation, for cast as well as crew, is improving. “I hope so,” says Moulton. “The talent is there, and it would be a real shame not to give people more to do. I think things are changing.”

“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.”

Her tastes are wide-ranging. “Dolly Parton is my favourite. My favourite dance music would probably be Show Me Love by Robin S, or Young Hearts Run Free by Candi Staton. For my 30th birthday, I had proper '70s old school music. It was a crisps party.”

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.”

What did the birthday girl wear? “I wore cheese and onion Walkers crisps. You put the packets in the oven and they shrink, and then I made them into a 1960s-style dress. They’re my favourite childhood crisp. Now, it’s Tyrrells, but those were a bit too expensive to make into a dress.”

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.”

It’s hard to imagine Ayling-Ellis has much spare time, but while she doesn’t much like cooking (“It’s outrageous to spend two hours cooking something you eat in ten minutes”) or exercise (“Who does?”) she’s recently become addicted to padel. “I’ve been going three or four times a week. I’ve got one big arm and one small one.” She’s also been learning some DIY. “My dad is teaching me. He taught my brother but never me, and I told him that’s wrong. I live in an old Edwardian house; my next task is stripping the paint off the window frame.”

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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Code of Silence is coming to ITV1 and ITVX on Sunday 18th May 2025.

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