Ireland’s rising star Ella Lily Hyland: ‘People would say I was meant for the stage, because I was mad’

The black curtain behind Ella Lily Hyland has dusty white smudges on it. She’s backstage at the Lyttelton Theatre, part of the National Theatre on London’s South Bank, and the clay substance she will later put on her face for that evening’s performance seems to have got everywhere. “I didn’t even know that was there,” she says of her backdrop. “It probably looks a bit mank.”The Carlow actor – usually Ella Lily at work, mostly Ella to her friends – is playing Chrysothemis in Electra/Persona, a play in which the leads, Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss, toss a coin at the start of every show to decide which roles (two each) they will take on that night. “I don’t envy the challenge,” Hyland says. “You could only do it with someone you really trust.” I ask if she would sign up for a similarly daunting exercise some time. She loves the stage, so “maybe”.This is poised to be a high-profile autumn for the rising Irish star. Tall Tales & Murder, a new RTÉ crime caper, debuts this weekend, while the countdown is on for the return of Netflix’s stellar Black Doves, in which she plays a memorably offbeat assassin-for-hire. “There’s a lot of things happening at the same time, which is really exciting, you know?” she says.In Tall Tales & Murder, she is Bridget, a nursing-home carer who another character, Paul (Casey Walsh), describes as a “bleedin’ dark horse”. Bridget will euthanise her patients if they ask her nicely. If attacked by someone from the “encyclopaedia of bad guys”, she will surprise herself by using a vape as an impromptu weapon. She’s a “complicated, contradictory” person, Hyland says, and a joy to play. “I think the adventure they end up going on is very much outside of her comfort zone.”READ MOREThe six-part series, commissioned by RTÉ and BBC Northern Ireland, was created by Love/Hate writer Stuart Carolan and The Thick of It star Chris Addison, who shares directing duties with Neasa Hardiman. Hyland is “a big admirer” of Carolan’s writing, she says. “I just felt really moved by what he’d written. That was kind of the main draw.”The show, shot in Dublin in the summer of 2025, has a screwball vibe with some surreal interludes. “The storytelling is insane,” Hardiman told me last year. Does Hyland like her projects to be a little bit bonkers? “You don’t want things to be mad just to be mad,” she says. Tall Tales & Murder will be entertaining for the audience, she thinks, because the comedic minds behind it have taken familiar archetypes, then pulled them apart.She lives in London but loved being home in Ireland to film the show, and as it was (somewhat unusually) commissioned upfront for two series, she already knows she’ll be back to shoot a second run. “Can’t wait for it,” she says.Our Friday afternoon chat is sandwiched between preparations for that night’s Electra/Persona and a morning spent “doing ADR” – re-recording dialogue to improve on-set sound quality – for the second season of Black Doves, which arrives on Netflix on November 5th.Anchored by quality lead performances from Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw, the first series of Joe Barton’s high-stakes London spy thriller, released in December 2024, was smartly paced, steeped in wit and featured characters viewers were made to actually care about, making it easily the most satisfying scripted series to launch on Netflix in recent years.Gabrielle Creevy, Kathryn Hunter and Ella Lily Hyland in Black Doves. Netflix “It definitely did a lot of things for me, Black Doves, and it was so unexpected as well,” Hyland says. She uses her own accent to play Williams, a danger-embracing “triggerman” who forms a double-act with fellow assassin Eleanor, played by Welsh actor Gabrielle Creavy.“We didn’t know what we were doing when we started filming. We were trying to kind of gauge what the tone was. Our characters were outside the tone in a way, and there was a lot of uncertainty about whether it would land. When it did, I felt like it led to a lot of other opportunities.”She hopes the second season goes down as well as the first and cites the “amazing actors” who have come on board for it, among them One Day’s Ambika Mod and Neve Campbell of Scream fame. I mention that a rewatch reminded me of Sarah Lancashire’s brilliant turn as an enigmatic spy handler. “She’s so good, isn’t she? She’s like a wizard of acting.”She thinks she has more verbal sparring scenes with the world-weary Sam, Whishaw’s character, this time around, but she can’t quite remember because the filming chaotically coincided with her casting in another play – The Unbelievers at London’s Royal Court Theatre – and that time is all “such a blur” to her now.By the end of the first series, Williams was showing her softer side, though she was often dubbed a psychopath in press, probably because she answered “it’s possible, I suppose” when asked if she might be one. She’s no more psychopathic than anyone else on the show, is she?“I was thinking that, actually. Someone was, like, she’s a psychopath and I never really thought of her as a psycho,” Hyland says. “Psychopathic tendencies”, sure. “I would say she’s quite philosophical. She thinks about life in this philosophical way, and I think that’s why it’s funny. You don’t expect her to come out with those things and then she does.”Ella Lily Hyland: 'After you go through what you do in a stage job, you feel like you can kind of do anything for a little while.' Photograph: Pip Hyland originally auditioned for the Eleanor role and thought she could “be kind of like Maura Higgins”, because the reality TV star’s midlands accent is close to her own and she thought a “really glam” killer, with full make-up and hair extensions, would be fun. “I went in talking about Love Island, and they were like, ‘No, we don’t know Love Island,’” she says, deadpan. The styling went in a different direction, but her initial instinct to incorporate a dash of Higgins still seems a clever one. “I think she would be such an amazing assassin. Can you imagine? She’d be, like, iconic.”Growing up in Carlow town, Hyland, who is now 27, “didn’t like school at all” and it didn’t suit her, she says. But it did offer at least one chance to perform. It was during a school production of Grease the Musical in her mid-teens that she started to “say out loud” to her friends that she wanted to do acting. Her mother had been in Carlow Little Theatre, an amateur dramatics group, alongside an “amazing” woman named Mary Doyle, who became Hyland’s drama teacher from the age of five, and it was under Doyle’s tutelage that she discovered she had a special love and knack for Shakespearean monologue.“With Shakespeare, I think a lot of people think it’s quite intellectual, but actually there’s a feeling to it. That’s why I think people who learn it when they’re young can understand it, because there’s a rhythm and a feeling and it is more of a sensory thing,” she says.Still, drama was just one of her “extracurriculars” at this point. Sport was another. Hyland comes from a family of pole-vaulters: her grandfather, Dinny Hyland, was an Irish pole-vaulting champion, while her father and uncle trained kids in the sport, and her uncle still does. She was among them, doing pole-vaulting and high jump up until the age of 16.“It’s something that taught me a lot because there’s a certain, like, discipline and focus that comes with it. A lot of the kids that went [to training] would be mad or, like, really hyper. I was one of them, you know,” she says.Aidan Gillen and Ella Lily Hyland in Tall Tales & Murder. Photograph: Pat Redmond “My da and my uncle definitely taught me how to channel my energy into a focused thing, and that really stood to me when I started getting into drama, and even now as an adult. Being able to take direction, first of all, is a positive. Everyone has the same shared goal, and there’s a patience to it, and focus and all that stuff.”She joined Carlow Youth Theatre after she heard two girls talking about it, then a month later she auditioned for the National Youth Theatre, winning a role in Salt Mountain, a play by Carmel Winters that ran at Project Arts Centre in 2015. “On the up: Ella Lily makes a confident national stage debut,” read the picture caption in a review of the production in the Irish Daily Mail.“Things started to happen really quickly. I was getting these opportunities to act and that’s when I was, like, Oh, this is what I love to do,” she says.During her stint with the National Youth Theatre, she heard other kids talk about “this school in Dublin”, meaning the Lir Academy. She auditioned and got in. Everything just happened step by step, rather than as the result of any grand design, it seems to her now. “Like, I felt like people around me would often say, ‘Oh, she’s meant for the stage,’ because I was mad,” she says. But it wasn’t a case of “I’m gonna go do this”.She was 17 when she started at the Trinity-based drama school, which counts Paul Mescal and her Black Doves co-star Agnes O’Casey among its alumni. “I just felt so happy to be there. Being that age, I had such a sense of awe for all of the teachers and teachings. I hadn’t been trained any other way, so I very much feel like I built any bit of technique there.”Two years after graduating, she won the lead role in the Prime Video series Fifteen-Love, in which she was Justine, a traumatised tennis prodigy who makes an allegation of abuse against her former coach, played by Aidan Turner. “I loved that part so much, and it was also the biggest opportunity I’d had since drama school in terms of the scale of production and having to carry a show,” she says.Fifteen-Love: Ella Lily Hyland and Aidan Turner. Photograph: Prime Video/World Productions The series, though fictional, was timely, as female tennis players had been increasingly speaking out about the abusive situations they were placed in when they were young. “I couldn’t believe how common it was, this coercive dynamic that goes on between coach and players.”Her sporty background came in handy when she embarked on tennis lessons for the show. Thankfully, however, no one has ever tried to test her teenage pole-vault or high-jump skills on set. “I probably wouldn’t be able to do it now. The stunt people are fecking amazing though as well. They’re so class.”[ Ella Lily Hyland: ‘I think we’re often taught not to trust our instincts as women’Opens in new window ]She has shown her spark in other screen roles, too, including a spot of costume-drama elegance in Towards Zero, a BBC Agatha Christie adaptation, and four days’ work on A Thousand Blows, Steven Knight’s Disney Plus crime series set in 1880s London. Then there was Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania, which involved a trip to the Baltic country for a week of party-scene night shoots. “I think Ali got me that job,” she says, referring to Wuthering Heights actor Alison Oliver, her friend and Lir classmate. She hasn’t seen the film, but remembers it was “gas” to make.Her training in Lir was a classical one, weighted towards the stage, and she wants to do more theatre if she can. “It’s where you learn, where you get to fail. I don’t think there’s anything quite as electric and humbling as being in front of a live audience every night. A full audience is going to be able to tell what’s true and what’s not true in a heartbeat.”She played the title role in Grania at the Abbey Theatre in 2024, with The Irish Times reviewer praising her “stage presence and humorous delivery”. Electra/Persona, meanwhile, began in August and will continue until mid-October before being shown in cinemas here as part of National Theatre Live.A run like this requires stamina, Hyland says. “It’s exhausting, but in a kind of beautiful way. After you go through what you do in a stage job, you feel like you can kind of do anything for a little while, until that wears off, because your muscle of acting and responding and creating is just so fit.”She feels “really lucky” to be acting opposite Blanchett and Hoss and believes she is subconsciously absorbing how they go about their work. “I’d say there’s lots that I’m learning that I won’t even have integrated until, like, two years’ time. It’s hard to be reflective or intellectual about it when you’re in it. It’s just more of a feeling thing. Like, I feel awe a lot of the time.”What are her ambitions? She says she would love to do Shakespeare professionally, but she doesn’t think too much about the future. Every job comes with its own beauty, its own challenges, and she feels “blessed” to be so busy.Tall Tales & Murder begins on RTÉ One on Sunday, September 27th. The complete first series will be available to stream on RTÉ Player straight away