British star Rose Ayling-Ellis is only 30 years old but has already broken new ground and torn down barriers left and right.
In 2021, she became the first deaf contestant on BBC‘s Strictly Come Dancing – and won the season. In 2022, Ayling-Ellis was the first celebrity to tell a bedtime story on BBC kids channel CBeebies, namely Raymond Antrobus’ Can Bears Ski?, in sign language. That year, she also gave the Alternative MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival, saying “I am disabled because I live and work in a world that disables me,” adding: “I am done with being the token deaf character.”
In 2023, she made her stage debut as Celia in Josie Rourke’s version of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It and received the Stage Debut Award for Best West End Debut and an Olivier Award nomination for best actress in a supporting role. And in 2024, she worked as a presenter for Channel 4’s coverage of the Summer Paralympics in Paris, making her the first deaf person to host live sports coverage on British TV.
The former EastEnders actress last year also featured in an episode of BBC hit series Ludwig — the U.K. public broadcaster’s biggest scripted show in years that is coming to streamer BritBox in the U.S. in March, and in December, she received an MBE, a royal honor awarded by King Charles III, for voluntary services to the deaf community from Princess Anne.
“I haven’t stopped working, I went back-to-back until Christmas, and I’ve been loving every single bit,” she tells THR in a conversation in London, and she does so with a big smile. After a busy 2024 and much more to come in 2025, she made time for the chat before going off on her first holiday in a while.
After all, Ayling-Ellis is gearing up for an even bigger 2025. Among her projects coming out this year are Signs for Living, her second Rogan Productions-produced BBC documentary series after 2023’s Signs for Change, a lead role in crime drama Code of Silence for ITV and BritBox, the April 15 U.S. release of her book Marvelous Messages: The Amazing Story of Communication by publisher DK, part of Penguin Random House, under its book deal with the star, the BBC revenge thriller series Reunion, set in the deaf community, and, like a cherry on top, a much-anticipated guest appearance on BBC sci-fi hit series Doctor Who.
But 2024 wasn’t all smooth and easy sailing though, and Ayling-Ellis likes it that way. “The Paralympics were definitely the most challenging for me because it was live TV,” she acknowledges. “I’m also not very knowledgeable about sports, but that’s why they wanted me on because they wanted me to ask questions most people would be thinking.” The result was a great response from audiences and compliments from lead presenter Clare Balding. “She’s got a big brain for sport,” recalls the young star. “So I was asking her all these questions. And Clare sometimes came back to me: ‘The question that you asked me, I never really thought of it. You’re really challenging me.””
The year ended on another high note for Ayling-Ellis, although the fact that she received a royal honor in December hasn’t fully sunken in. “It is a weird one because it doesn’t feel real yet,” she tells THR. “I remember receiving the letter saying you got an MBE. … And then I got a letter from (Queen) Camilla, where she wrote ‘I’m really pleased that you got one.’ And then I went to Windsor Castle and brought my family, my mom, my dad and my brother. It was really nice.”
The end of the year also brought a blockbuster announcement as Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies revealed that Ayling-Ellis would star in an episode of the latest season this year. “She’s the lead in one episode, which is stunning,” he said. “It’s — I think — our scariest episode, absolutely terrifying, and she’s magnificent.”
As the news reverberated around the Whoniverse, the actress was struck by the immediate buzz. “All my friends talked about that,” she recalls, describing the role as a special treat. “I genuinely was a fan of Doctor Who growing up as a kid. It was a thing that I watched on a Saturday with my mum and my brother on telly, and we’d get excited about it. I’ve been watching it for a long time. So, I was so excited when they offered me this role. I said yes, 100 percent.”
She did have to share her Doctor Who knowledge though to educate a friend. “I had to travel on a train up to Wales [where the series shoots] and I had my interpreter with me, but she doesn’t know much about Doctor Who,” Ayling-Ellis recalls. “So I sat her down to explain everything, like that the Doctor regenerates. So, genuinely, I am a big fan of Doctor Who and it was just an incredible experience. I really wanted to, and had to, keep it a secret for a long time because we filmed it in February last year.”
The creative team has been keeping specifics about her role under wraps beyond sharing a photo of her in character.

Also hitting the BBC this year is Reunion, a crime thriller set in the deaf community in Sheffield, whose cast includes Ayling-Ellis. “What was really refreshing about Reunion was that it was probably my first job out of everything where I wasn’t the only deaf person,” she tells THR. “Having so many deaf people on set was quite nice because I felt I didn’t have to educate people. They already had interpreters there. I could literally just turn up.”
Most industry shoots are very different. “Most of the time, for a crew, it is the first time ever being around deaf people,” she explains. “So it’s become just a natural routine for me to educate people. Sometimes I don’t realize how much extra work I do. It has become so normal for me. But it was so interesting to have deaf crew on that and how it worked with the hearing people. We have started to see more deaf actors, but having deaf crew feels like it only just started last year really.”
Overall, 2024 felt like a breakthrough year for the deaf community in the entertainment industry to Ayling-Ellis. “There were so many deaf projects last year,” she explains. “There were so many productions that had deaf people to the point where if I wanted to book deaf crew members, many would have already been booked for another job.”
Does she see herself as a pioneer who helped open doors for more deaf people in the sector, especially given her high-profile speech at the Edinburgh TV festival? “I don’t know,” says Ayling-Ellis. “It’s quite interesting with the TV process and how things get made, as the starting of filming normally takes a while. So I was thinking maybe that started the conversation and made people open their minds. Last year especially was quite interesting. A lot less is getting commissioned [overall]. The money in the TV industry is getting tighter, and a lot of people are struggling and trying to get things made. Yet, it was the best year ever for deaf people and deaf groups, and that opportunity has been so great. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the public responds to it.”
The young Brit’s acting includes both signing and speaking. “I’m bilingual, which means I speak and sign,” Ayling-Ellis explains. “I play a role where I speak and sign in Reunion, but now in Code of Silence, I just speak at times, and I just sign at times. Everyone is saying that actors have accents. I don’t really do accents. But my sign language can be my accent really, because everyone signs in a slightly different way. So I know how to play with that for each of my characters and try and make them quite different from each other. When I do play a role where I just turn off my voice and just sign, it is quite freeing because I can really focus on my emotion. But to speak and sign, because I’ve been doing it all my life, is quite second nature to me.”
So how does expressing personalities through signing work? “When you speak, you have different tones in your voice that match your emotion,” Ayling-Ellis explains. “But with sign language, when we’re a bit angry, it can be big, or it can be small signs, or it can be about different speeds. And sometimes I can’t speak when I’m really emotional, so I go into my sign language. But if I’m really angry, sometimes my signing gets a bit less and I need my voice more.”
There are some things that hearing people must learn when working with deaf actors on shoots that aren’t always clear to them, she also highlights. “When you’re filming and doing many takes, you have to be conscious of certain things. When you put down a cup, then in the next shot, you have to put it down in the same place to make sure it’s all the same,” Ayling-Ellis mentions as an example. “With your voice, it doesn’t matter whatever tone you use, but with sign language, it does matter because it is a movement. So if you see your hand over someone’s shoulder, you’ve got to keep that there because you need that hand in your next shot. So a lot of hearing people when they’re editing, they never thought about where the beginning or the end of the signing is before.”
Furthering education about deaf people and sign language is close to Ayling-Ellis’ heart. No surprise then that she has a second documentary coming to British TV, Signs for Living. “It’s a super documentary about teaching elderly people in a retirement village sign language,” she notes. “So I taught a 95-year-old man how to sign for the first time ever in his life. It’s very surprising how it went.”

She worked on the project with the same Rogan Productions team that she collaborated with on Signs for Change, her first BBC doc focused on the deaf community. “They said we want to do more documentaries like this. And there are so many different issues, so we had a meeting and decided to focus on deaf people in their older lives. When they want to go to a retirement or care home, there are not many options for deaf people. Literally, there are only two care homes in the U.K. that provide access to deaf people. And loneliness is a big issue for older people.”
As if Ayling-Ellis doesn’t have enough going on in 2025, she will also be in the spotlight as the lead of Code of Silence, coming to ITV in the U.K., followed by its U.S. launch on BritBox this summer. In the drama series, she plays a deaf woman struggling to make ends meet who works at a local bar and at a police station canteen and ends up getting called in as an emergency lip reader for a major investigation.
About two years ago, she was approached by production firm Mammoth Screen about the role with a pitch that, she says, went a little something like this: “We got this writer called Catherine [Moulton]. She has this idea. And I was like, ‘Oh, I really love this idea.’ Catherine is losing hearing herself. So she went and learned how to lip read, but then she realized lip reading isn’t what she thought it was, and that inspired her to write this story.”
This isn’t where Ayling-Ellis’ character Alison’s challenges end. “Everyone is underestimating her ability and what she’s capable of doing, and she’s just on a mission to prove them all wrong,” she says. Importantly, it’s not a show that makes lip reading seem easier than it is. “Lip reading is about working it out — guessing and trying to figure it out,” the star emphasizes. “In Code of Silence, the audience is going on that journey with Allison. So when Alison is trying to work out something someone says, we’re all going to be trying to work it out with her, so it will be frustrating at times.”
Ayling-Ellis will also get a chance to make more new fans in the U.S. this year when she brings her book Marvelous Messages to the U.S. “Join Rose Ayling-Ellis, her cool cat Halo, and their magical tour guide, Perky the Pigeon on a time-traveling, globetrotting adventure to explore the story of communication as never before,” a synopsis for the U.K. release reads. “Discover ancient language and decipher secret codes on a journey through time in this book for children aged 7-9.”

It was an old dream of hers to put together something like this. “I always wanted to create a children’s book. That’s always been a mission of mine,” she tells THR. “I really wanted to create a book that I didn’t have when I was a child, and that’s what inspired me. I feel this is something that’s been missing. When I was growing up, I was told, ‘Oh, if you were deaf 100 years ago, you would have been locked up in a mental health institution.’ But I started my own research, and I found out that it’s not true at all. There are so many interesting deaf people in history.”
The tone of the book, with a focus on being educational but not lecturing, was also key for Ayling-Ellis. “That’s the best way to teach people in my experience because if you just lecture, people get bored of it,” she mentions.
How different will the U.S. version of the book be from the U.K. version? “These are different languages and sign languages, so you must change the hand shapes for it, among other things,” she explains.
Given her ambition, persistence, and drive, is it important for Ayling-Ellis to get to portray strong and relatable deaf female characters on screen, I wonder? “That’s what I try to do in every single project I do, breaking down that fourth or fifth wall. It’s about breaking that down by showing the audience something that everyone experiences at some point in their life.”
Take Code of Silence: “We all have experiences of people assuming what we are and being frustrated with that. Everyone experiences that, and that’s breaking down that wall,” the actress says.
Is there anything in particular Ayling-Ellis would love to work on in the future? “One thing I haven’t done is film,” she highlights. “I would love to do a back-in-time sort of thing. What was it like being deaf back then or something like that? Or I would quite like to murder people [on-screen] — you can play that sort of thing, and you’re not actually murdering anyone. I’m sure everyone would assume a young deaf girl would never do [that], so that character would have a vulnerability to play around with.”
But laughs would also be something she would like to explore: “I would love to do comedy. I feel with deaf stories we haven’t really done comedy on a major level.”
The rising British star also has another dream — to meet a certain music legend. After all, while she shares that she is currently “obsessed” with singer-songwriter Cleo Sol, “I do like old music: Al Green and Stevie Wonder and Dusty Springfield and Dolly Parton. I love Dolly Parton.”
Yes, people don’t always understand how it works when she mentions her passion for music, she emphasizes, explaining that “my hearing aid has got Bluetooth, so I can just connect, and it is better than headphones for hearing people.” And she even has Spotify proof of her love for The Queen of Country. “I’m in the top 0.01 percent of Dolly Parton fans. So I have to meet her,” Ayling-Ellis says. “Number one on the bucket list: meet Dolly Parton.”
