Aidan Turner and Ella Lily Hyland on Amazon Prime Video drama Fifteen-Love: ‘It's a delicate story to tell’

Ella Lily Hyland and Aidan Turner recently joined NationalWorld’s Alex Moreland to discuss Fifteen-Love ahead of its Amazon Prime Video debut. They discussed what drew them to the series initially, explained how they were each influenced by the others’ performance, and broke down some of the challenges involved in telling a story about abuse sensitively. 

First of all, just to set the scene very briefly: what was it that drew you to Fifteen-Love in the first place? Why was it something you wanted to be involved in?

Ella Lily Hyland: I was just completely drawn to Justine and her athleticism and primal instinct – the idea of playing an athlete, both as a person and when she's playing tennis. I think that the writing has such a momentum, and such an excitement, that it just felt like [something] I really wanted to do.

Aidan Turner: Yeah, I just love the scripts. When I read them, I thought they were really well written. I think it's a delicate story to tell – I think there's a world where it can be done clumsily, maybe – but I think Hania [Elkington, writer/creator of Fifteen-Love] has done such a great job. They're smart [scripts], I think they’re really nuanced, and the characters are really well explored. 

When I was reading it – obviously, as an actor, you look at the whole, the bigger picture, but then you start to hone in on your character and where they lie in this world – I thought he was a really interesting character. [He’s] very layered, lots of different sides to Glenn. He has his public face and a private one, and then a very private one. I thought to juggle all those attributes of his character, and to create a fluid and a flow with his character through the show, that arc and that journey he's on, will be really challenging. 

But yeah, I just thought the whole piece worked. You know, it's rare that you do something these days, I suppose, where it just lies in itself as a miniseries – you know, you're not sort of tying little bows around certain things for a Series 2 or 3. The entirety of our story is held in these episodes. So, I thought that was quite alluring too.

What was your working relationship like? How would you say your performances were influenced by the other?

ELH: I feel like a huge aspect that I found really intriguing about it was the idea of an individual sport and that coach/player relationship – that very intimate and personal language that is shared in that space, especially with athletes performing at such a high level. A lot of it is like, there is a power dynamic there, and there's a lot of faith in that person who was coaching – and, probably similarly, there's a lot of faith that the coach is putting in the athlete. I think like, that was probably the jumping point [for us] for finding their dynamic together – that shared language and shared goal that they had, which is really specific and intimate in itself. 

AT: Ella is anchoring this, Ella is anchoring this show. She’s in nearly all of the scenes, which is a huge amount of work for an actor to take on: your head is all over the place in any given moment, because you're following the story in intricate detail, crafting your way through this entire series, but on a given day, you could be shooting scenes out of order in many different ways. So, for me, I was really inspired to see somebody hold the space so well, and the way you did – your level of concentration, I found really inspiring. Working with you, it felt like I was talking to somebody who had done this many, many, many times before, and I know that you haven't, so I was really in awe of that. 

Your talent, just as an actor, I think was kind of blew me away. Everything about the way you crafted her character, but then even just the small things – like, we're both Irish, obviously, and your accent is so specific and flawless – were just brilliant, brilliant moments that you brought to Justine. So that was inspiring for me as an actor, to work with somebody who just brings so much on a daily basis, because then everyone has to up their game.

ELH: We had to do such difficult scenes, and I feel actually very lucky to have this – because this is my first experience with a role this big, and working for this long, and working on a story that's six episodes. Like, it's six hours of TV, and I felt like we just had loads of fun with it, even though it was difficult? We laughed loads, and there was an ease that we found together that I felt like really lucky to have – because I think it is rare as well, you know, there's so many stories of how different approaches work or don't work with actors. I just felt like we had a lot of fun with it? The story is so dark, but we just laughed loads, we were always messing and laughing. 

AT: I think that was a way of creatively finding the truth and authenticity in the scene. I think sometimes if the room was so dark, you know, you just you can't let any light in, and then you're not really expressing the story as it should be? It just becomes this heavy, dark, difficult thing, that really doesn't have any resolve or answers. So I think, even unintentionally or subconsciously or something, we shared a thing that, just as you said, kept it creative and fun for us, even through some of the darker moments. We would find the darker elements in it, but I think to get there creatively, I think you have to have a multitude – a plethora – of emotions to take you in there as an actor to let you explore the thing you're exploring.

ELH: And they had a friendship, too – [I tried] to always find the friendship element of them. I remember coming in, like, I don't know how someone is going to play Glenn. I almost I found his character – reading it, before I met you – really repulsive. I was like, it's going to be difficult to understand that attachment. Do you know what I mean? But I think I was always so surprised with how likable he was [in Turner’s performance] and how much he shined his light on everyone he met, and how susceptible athletes and young people and anyone in general is to that. It's a very human thing, to be enamoured by that light, and I think that you have that in spades. So that made the scenes quite interesting, because they could have been played one way – even stuff that I was auditioning with, I found there was an aggression to Glenn, that was my instinct from the way I was looking at it, and for you to not have that aggression, well –

AT: Therein lies the danger. Because that's somebody who you would trust and believe and follow and admire, and all the other things, I suppose that plays into the hands of somebody who’s preying on that situation.

Just picking up on that, then – when you’ve got a story like this, which is about sexual assault and abuse of power, what are some of the challenges in terms of realising that on screen as entertainment?

AT: I mean, it's difficult, isn't it? As we said earlier, I mean, it can so easily – unintentionally, nobody sets out in this business to create something bad, you don't set out to create bad work, everyone has the best intentions going in. But sometimes along the way, wheels can fall off, things get misrepresented, certain cadences of scenes aren't hit, and that changes the trajectory of the show, and it loses its tone or what was working for it. 

I think [with Fifteen-Love] it's in the scripts, it's in the writing, from the very, very early days it always felt like a very finished product – I don't want to sound like it's, you know, a commercial material piece of something you buy in a supermarket, but it felt like a lot of the work had been done. We weren't coming on the show to figure things out, or just “let's see how this lands” – the overall tone of the piece I felt reading it sustained its way through to the end of us shooting it. Which isn't always the case! Things change. You’re in something, you're going “this is actually a lot funnier than I thought it would be” or whatever, and things will just take a different approach. 

This always felt like the thing it was, which I think is always a good sign of really solid story, and a really well-crafted script. It also felt immediately that we were in the hands of people who cared a lot about telling the story in the right way; it never felt like we were trying to do something that we shouldn't be doing, or using “entertainment purposes” to dial this up and maybe a bit of this, bit more of that. The story – Justine’s story – was always the most important thing. That always felt like it was cared for, and there were caretakers around us to make sure that we executed that in the right way. I really think we have – it's been something that's been watched from the beginning, but with Hania and with Jake [Lushington, executive producer] and with everyone, I think I knew I was stepping in to that world anyway, and I trusted everyone from the very beginning, and they were brilliant all the way through.

ELH: Yeah, I think that's really interesting what you said about the finished product, because I do feel, watching it, that I have the same feeling that I felt when I was reading it. I feel like it has such an integrity and vision at an early stage, that's really true. It's not to be taken for granted, because this is my first big television role, so like you saying that we're didn’t really have to figure anything out – yeah, absolutely not? It was well thought through. 

AT: Yeah, it was very controlled. And I don't always love that word, but it was expressive and creative and all those things too – I guess that that control, there was safety in that too, to know that with a difficult subject like this that it is in the right hands, moving in the right direction, and with the right approach.

Fifteen-Love will begin on Amazon Prime Video on Friday 21 July. You can listen to an excerpt of the above interview with Aidan Turner and Ella Lily Hyland as part of Screen Babble #35, and read our interview with Fifteen-Love stars Harmony Rose Bremner, Jessica Darrow, and Tom Varey here.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly television newsletter, listen to our Screen Babble podcast, and follow us on twitter @NationalWorldTV. You can also find me @morelandwriter.