Deaf people are often treated like children, Rose Ayling-Ellis said. “I’m a woman,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m 30 years old.” Photo / Max Miechowski, The New York Times
Rose Ayling-Ellis, who stars in the TV crime drama Code of Silence, wants the world to understand that deaf people live complex and varied lives.
When Rose Ayling-Ellis is lip-reading, she’s guessing most of the time.
“You can get the shape of a mouth,” she said recently, but to understand what someone is saying, context is everything. “You have to pick up body language, the mood, the vibe,” she said.
Ayling-Ellis, 30, said that learning to lip-read had been “a survival technique”. The actor, who was born deaf, speaks and also uses British Sign Language, and was aided in an interview by an interpreter. In the TV crime thriller Code of Silence, which is available on TVNZ+ , Ayling-Ellis plays a deaf woman who is recruited by the police to eavesdrop discreetly.
In the show, as in life, she said, lip reading is “like a puzzle”.
When Ayling-Ellis’ character, Alison, watches CCTV footage of suspected gang members, she scrutinises their facial expressions and observes how they stand. Like any good detective, Alison must study the scene, piecing together clues. In a clever visual conceit, jumbled subtitles appear on-screen and gradually unscramble as she decodes each sentence.
Code of Silence first screened on ITV in Britain in May, and its debut episode drew over 6 million viewers, according to the broadcaster. Ayling-Ellis was already known to many from Strictly Come Dancing, the wildly popular BBC show that inspired the Dancing With the Stars franchise. She won the show in 2021 with a routine, to Clean Bandit and Zara Larsson’s Symphony, that fell silent halfway to mirror her experience of being deaf.
That victory made her a household name and landed her TV presenting gigs, including as a sportscaster at the 2024 Paralympic Games. But after being “on the TV as myself quite a few times,” she said, she wanted to get back to acting.
This year, Ayling-Ellis has also starred in the miniseries Reunion, a revenge thriller about a deaf man recently released from prison, and played opposite Ncuti Gatwa in an episode of the cult sci-fi series Doctor Who. Though she has been acting professionally for 13 years, Code of Silence is her first leading role.
Her character in the show is working in a police station cafeteria when one of the officers recruits her, and she also has a side hustle as a pub bartender to make ends meet. “I feel like that is what is currently happening in the UK,” Ayling-Ellis said. “Everyone needs two or three jobs to be able to pay the rent.”
She said that she and the show’s creator and screenwriter, Catherine Moulton, wanted to reflect that times were “hard for everyone” in Britain at the moment, and “even harder for disabled people”.
The British Government’s treatment of disabled people has been in the spotlight this year, and last month Prime Minister Keir Starmer proposed restricting welfare benefits to tamp down on rising social security spending. “This Government is trying to get disabled people back to work, but not providing the help for us to be able to work,” Ayling-Ellis said.
While she wanted to draw attention to the barriers that disabled people face, she said, she also wanted to show that they live complex and varied lives. “We’ve got personalities. We make mistakes. We have love interests,” she said.
Hungry for adventure and against her better judgment, her character in “Code of Silence” strikes up a romantic relationship with one of the gang members she is investigating. That was in contrast, Ayling-Ellis said, to a desexualised perception of disabled people, who often “get treated like a child”.
She shook her head. “I’m a woman. I’m 30 years old.”
During her childhood in Hythe, a seaside town about 95km southeast of London, she often felt like “the only deaf person in the whole word,” she said.
After high school, she studied fashion at an art college, and specialised in embellishments like beading. “I don’t need to be able to hear to do that job,” she recalled thinking. Now, she felt “a little bit angry about that,” she said, adding, “I should’ve chosen what I wanted to do, rather than what I thought other people would accept me doing.”
As a teenager, Ayling-Ellis had attended a film-making workshop for deaf children. But being behind the camera was “slow and boring” – whereas being in front of it was another story. “It’s energetic, and I’d really get into a role,” she said: “I loved performing.”
She joined Deafinitely Youth Theatre, part of a London-based company for deaf people, and looked for other gigs on the side. “At that time, I didn’t have an agent,” she said, “so I used to get jobs through Facebook.” Ayling-Ellis said she was first “noticed” after being cast in a BBC miniseries called Summer of Rockets, a role that landed her representation. She went on to appear in the long-running British soap opera Eastenders, which she described as “my film school for two years”.
Since winning Strictly Come Dancing, Ayling-Ellis said she had “felt a responsibility to try and educate people, to shift their minds in how they see deaf people.” She has presented several documentaries about deafness and published a children’s book, Marvelous Messages, which highlights what she called “the many other ways” of communicating “that are not speaking or listening.” The book also includes inspiring deaf figures from history, like stuntwoman Kitty O’Neil.
When Ayling-Ellis was growing up, deaf role models were scarce, she said: “Helen Keller? Great lady! She’s blind and deaf and a Victorian woman. But I’m not relating.”
Moulton, the Code of Silence creator, who is partly deaf, said that she became a fan of Ayling-Ellis watching Strictly Come Dancing and wrote the TV show with her in mind. She also cast deaf actors Fifi Garfield and Rolf Choutan as Alison’s mother and ex-boyfriend. Moulton said she hoped to create roles for deaf actors “who haven’t always got those chances to be able to build a career, to get to the place that Rose is now”.
Samantha Baines, a British actress who wears hearing aids, said that Ayling-Ellis had a similar attitude. “Rose ensures that any live event she takes part in has live captions as well as British Sign Language interpretation, any radio show has transcripts and promotes the hiring of other deaf creatives,” she said. “Rose isn’t pulling the ladder up after herself.”
Ayling-Ellis said she had begun noticing that her TV work was having an impact – not just for deaf people, but among hearing audiences, too. “Lately, I’m starting to see people signing to me more,” she said. “I think they’re a bit more excited about meeting deaf people, rather than terrified of getting it wrong.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Simran Hans
Photographs by: Max Miechowski
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