Carlow-born Ella Lily Hyland is set to break out in Amazon’s upcoming tennis series Fifteen-Love, which focuses on the ups and downs of Hyland’s young sporting prodigy Justine Pearce. Created by Hania Elkington and directed by Eva Riley and Toby Macdonald, the show co-stars Aidan Turner and Anna Chancellor. “I did loads of training,” says the 24-year-old actor. “And they had such incredible people on board, like Naomi Cavaday, who is a tennis coach and played at Wimbledon.”
In addition, Hyland stars in writer/director Johnny Barrington’s debut feature Silent Roar. “It’s about a young surfer whose dad has just died, who then makes friends with my character,” she reveals. “They become a catalyst for each other in lots of different ways. It was quite special. We got to spend a couple of months on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland.”
Another graduate of The Lir Academy in Dublin, Hyland first considered an acting career in her teens, when she did a play with the National Youth Theatre.
But it was a collaboration with writer/director Louise Lowe and Anu, the well-known Irish theatre collective, that truly fuelled her creative spirit. “Getting to workshop with Louise and Anu was great because it put into focus of the type of work that really made me feel passionate and excited. Louise would have been a big influence on that.”
Other upcoming projects include Motherland director Tomas Vengris’s sophomore feature 5 & 1⁄2 Love Stories In An Apartment In Vilnius, Lithuania, a co-production between Lithuania, Ireland and Latvia, which centres around five guests who experience a romantic crisis in an Airbnb.
As her acting career grows, the now London-based Hyland is also focused on her long-held interest in screenwriting. “It’s important to me to be always making something. I wrote a screenplay that I’m working on with Juanita Wilson,” says Hyland of the writer/director of Tomato Red. “It’s influenced a lot by where I grew up, and the more I sit with it, the more it grows. My ambition is to be a part of the making process and to be in environments that are collaborative.”
Contact: Joe Powell, Curtis Brown
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