Trigger warning: sexual abuse and domestic violence.
Fifteen-Love, Amazon Prime Video’s #MeToo show about a teenage tennis player and her abusive coach, is must-see TV and at the centre of it all is Ella Lily Hyland’s ace performance. For his latest GLAMOUR UK column, Josh Smith Meets, Josh talks to Ella about the intense preparations she undertook to bring this abusive relationship to the screen.
“I've just dyed my eyebrows blonde for art, so I am thriving,” Ella Lily Hyland immediately tells me Zooming in from her homeland of Ireland where she is shooting a secret pilot.
Ella is truly thriving right now. This latest mystery project will be one of many roles that come Ella’s way after her first major screen role in Amazon Prime Video's new psychological TV thriller, Fifteen-Love has received rave reviews. And if you haven’t watched it yet, Fifteen-Love is essential viewing but you wouldn’t expect anything less from the producers of Line of Duty and Virgil.
Fifteen-Love begins with 17 year old tennis ace, Justine Pierce (Ella) who, whilst readying herself for the semi-finals of the French Open, kisses her coach Glenn (Poldark’s Aidan Turner) in the locker room. But all is not what it seems. As the match reaches its conclusion, Justine collapses on court in pain with a severe fractured wrist, an injury which ends her career. When we flash forward to the present day we find Justine partying hard whilst holding down a job as a sports physiotherapist at her old sporting academy and her life comes crashing down around her again when her ex-coach returns and Justine accuses him of sexual assault.
There truly aren’t enough adjectives to describe Ella’s performance in the show: she’s mesmerising, intense, powerful and vulnerable all at the same time and it’s a pitch perfect nuanced performance that is needed for sensitively portraying the abusive relationships that can develop within imbalances in power. A TV show exploring abuse in tennis is timely too, as former world number four, Jelena Dokic recently shared images of the domestic abuse she suffered at the hands of father after losing a match and Grand slam champion, Pam Shriver recently revealed she had a traumatic relationship with her 50-year-old coach when she was just 17 years old. She has since called for more rigorous policing of the relationships between young athletes and their coaches.
Given the heaviness and sensitivity of the subject matter, Ella did copious amounts of research. “I spoke to a survivor of abuse and that was the most important part of the journey really,” she shares. “It's actually harrowing when you read into it, just how many stories there are. Just connecting to someone and hearing from their mouth really does give a whole other weight to the importance of telling the story. I would be on set and she would be constantly on my mind and hearing how it affects people mentally and how many years it takes people to come forward, too. In our show it's five years but in reality it takes people over 20 years to come out and that trauma lives in the body.”
Ella went down a surprising route to bring the physicality of trauma to life on screen. “I had an amazing movement coach, Louise Kempton, who was also our intimacy coordinator and I worked a lot with her about that physical aspect and thinking where does trauma sit in the body and how do you carry it? And if you're an athlete who's kind of taught to use your body as a machine, where do you put that kind of trauma? Where and how does it come out, does it come out in your behaviour?”
“It sounds mad but we did a little bit of animal work,” the 24-year-old adds. “We were imagining her as a horse because horses are so muscular and athletic. When they, like Justine, don’t have their sport to exercise their athleticism, they have all this dead weight of muscle. She has an impulse to run, but now has to bottle it because she doesn't have the sport to express all of this power, strength and tenacity that horses have, too. We wanted Justine to be physically strong and mentally strong as well as vulnerable, that was a really important shade that we wanted to get. Also a horse has a trainer and even though they're this gorgeous, huge strong animal, they still are very submissive to their trainer, they do what they're told and they need their trainer to be fed and to be cared for. That was a really helpful way in for me.”
Whilst exploring the mental health impacts of trauma, after Justine accuses her coach of sexual assault, the show also asks the question: who do you believe? There is no escaping the fact that we frustratingly still live in a society where women are not automatically believed. People will routinely try to disprove survivors of abuse and sexual assault’s truth and Fifteen-Love is no different. Justine’s mental health is brought up by her mother, her friends, the person who assaulted her and the police are sceptical about her claims too. How frustrating did Ella find portraying a character who has to fight to be believed?
“I think that's sadly existed since as far back as you can remember, branding a woman ‘difficult’ and the inability to have empathy for behaviorisms or traits of a woman that don't submit to patriarchy and they don’t fit in a box,” Ella replies. “The words used are difficult, or too much, or too loud or different. It still happens and in Justine’s story people find it hard to empathise. They find it hard to understand because people want to get on with whatever they're getting on with and they don't want to sit back and look at all elements of the story. They just want to keep their narrative of things moving along swiftly. Justine breaks that and she has a tendency to be rebellious and speak out when she doesn't like something. People become startled with their narrative being shaken up of who Glenn is, who she is and what that time was like in their life.”
“The most frustrating thing I found playing her was you can feel her desire to still be accepted and loved by the people who aren't there for her,” Ella continues. “I resonated with how it just takes such tremendous courage in any circumstance to go against the grain, go against what everyone else thinks, and stand out on your own and say, ‘no, this actually isn't okay.’ And even though her best friend doesn't believe her, she wants to maintain that connection, she wants to love her, be there for her. That was just the most heartbreaking thing because as humans our main desire is just to connect with one another and to to be ripped of that opportunity when you've been through a trauma is heartbreaking. The most heartbreaking thing in these situations is the isolation and how people's lives are on the line when they're not being believed or listened to or acknowledged.”
Mentally carrying this storyline around with her for over nine months must have been tough on Ella personally, but going home and watching Love Island as an escape helped alongside going on a cathartic journey to justice with Justine. “There's such momentum to shooting all day, every day so in a way your body takes care of you through that time,” Ella says. “Sometimes it can feel overwhelming and then other times it feels like ‘I am on top of this, I can come in and out in each scene and I'm doing a job,’ and at the end of filming it, I felt like her resolution became my resolution.”
Building a trusting relationship off screen with Aiden Turner who plays her abusive coach, also helped. “A week before filming we went off with Eva Riley, who was the director of the first block and did improvisations and tried to figure out the friendship inside their dynamic,” Ella tells me. “We hung out loads and spent that week figuring out what their rapport was, how they communicated and establishing their friendship because with a coach and player they are your best friend in a way because when you're playing at that level and you're always away on tour. They're the person you're seeing the most. There’s a unique language and the two of you are the only people who share this language and this desire that's mutual to win. That intimacy requires a lot of trust and a lot of friendship so we established a friendship dynamic in that week and from then on we just had each other's back and it felt like when we had to do the darker scenes that we had each other.”
Away from tackling the trauma of the role came perfecting the tennis skills. How did Ella get in the zone? Saving Maria Sharapova as the wallpaper on her phone was the first step. “Maria Sharapova was my screensaver from when I auditioned," she laughs. “It was this really hot picture of her in her Wimbledon whites. I kept it there until I finished filming and I really didn't wanna change it when we finished filming cause it had been my screensaver for nearly nine months!”
If only it was as easy as just manifesting the skills of Maria Sharapova, a five time grand slam champion, there was intense tennis training, too which involved spending a lot of time with former professional player Naomi Cavaday. “I never played it before,” Ella admits. “We did three months of training and it was intense! But I didn't mind it because I felt like I had so many nerves and pent up energy that I felt like sweating and using my body all the time was the best way to get it out. It was the best way to research, too, because we were in all these amazing tennis courts, with really prestigious coaches and being in that world was like research by osmosis.”
The hardest part of training? “Cutting myself some slack and being like, ‘you don't actually have to be like a tennis professional. That's not going to happen. It’s not really possible!’ I kept really wanting to be able to hit the ball in a certain way and then they were like, ‘you just need to know how to dance it, because you're never going to be able to do what Ons Jabeur is doing, you have to pretend!’” There will alas be no Centre Court appearances for Ella anytime soon, then.
Before our time wraps up I want to talk to Ella about the legacy of #MeToo and the conversations Fifteen-Love will hopefully start. After all, it's been over five years since the #MeToo movement attempted to make the entertainment industry a safer space for women and although progress has been made there is a long way to go. “I think I would be most proud of people, young people especially, coming away from the show and being aware of how they might be being manipulated or coerced or understanding for themselves their own boundaries and that grey area of power, and the imbalances of power,” Ella responds. “I think just to inspire people to be brave enough to come forward and to not feel as alone as survivors of abuse would feel, would be what I hope the show would do.” Let’s hope.
Fifteen-Love is streaming on Amazon Prime now.
If you've been affected by anything in this article please reach out to Rape Crisis.
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