When Rose Ayling-Ellis is lip-reading, she's guessing most of the time.

"You can get the shape of a mouth," she said recently, but to understand what someone is saying, context is everything. "You have to pick up body language, the mood, the vibe," she said during an interview in London.

Ayling-Ellis, 30, said that learning to lip-read had been "a survival technique." The actress, who was born deaf, speaks and also uses British Sign Language, and was aided in an interview by an interpreter.

In the British TV crime thriller Code of Silence, Ayling-Ellis plays a deaf woman who is recruited by the police to eavesdrop discreetly.

In the show, as in life, she said, lip reading is "like a puzzle."

When Ayling Ellis' character, Alison, watches CCTV footage of suspected gang members, she scrutinises their facial expressions and observes how they stand.

Like any good detective, Alison must study the scene, piecing together clues. In a clever visual conceit, jumbled subtitles appear on-screen and gradually unscramble as she decodes each sentence.

On the set of 'Code of Silence', Ayling-Ellis (right) plays a deaf woman recruited by police to lip read suspects in a high-stakes investigation. — Itv/Instagram

Ayling-Ellis was already known to many from Strictly Come Dancing, the popular BBC reality TV show that inspired the Dancing With the Stars franchise. She won the show in 2021 with a routine that fell silent halfway to mirror her experience of being deaf.

That victory made her a household name and landed her TV presenting gigs, including as a sportscaster at the 2024 Paralympic Games. But after being "on the TV as myself quite a few times," she said, she wanted to get back to acting.

This year, Ayling-Ellis has also starred in the miniseries Reunion, a revenge thriller about a deaf man recently released from prison, and played opposite Ncuti Gatwa in an episode of the cult sci-fi series Doctor Who.

Though she has been acting professionally for 13 years, Code of Silence is her first leading role.

Her character in the show is working in a police station cafeteria when one of the officers recruits her, and she also has a side hustle as a pub bartender to make ends meet.

"I feel like that is what is currently happening in Britain," Ayling-Ellis said. "Everyone needs two or three jobs to be able to pay the rent."

She said that she and the show's creator and screenwriter, Catherine Moulton, wanted to reflect that times were "hard for everyone" in Britain at the moment, and "even harder for disabled people."

Breaking the silence

While she wanted to draw attention to the barriers that disabled people face, she said, she also wanted to show that they live complex and varied lives. "We've got personalities. We make mistakes. We have love interests," she said.

Hungry for adventure and against her better judgment, her character in Code of Silence strikes up a romantic relationship with one of the gang members she is investigating. That was in contrast, Ayling-Ellis said, to a desexualised perception of disabled people, who often "get treated like a child."

She shook her head. "I'm a woman. I'm 30 years old."

During her childhood in Hythe, a seaside town about 60 miles southeast of London, she often felt like "the only deaf person in the whole word," she said.

After high school, she studied fashion at an art college, and specialised in embellishments like beading.

"I don’t need to be able to hear to do that job," she recalled thinking. Now, she felt "a little bit angry about that," she said, adding, "I should’ve chosen what I wanted to do, rather than what I thought other people would accept me doing."

As a teenager, Ayling-Ellis had attended a filmmaking workshop for deaf children. But being behind the camera was "slow and boring" - whereas being in front of it was another story. "It's energetic, and I'd really get into a role," she said: "I loved performing."

In her children’s book, Ayling-Ellis takes readers on an engaging adventure exploring how communication has evolved over time. — Rose.a.e/Instagram

She joined Deafinitely Youth Theater, part of a London-based company for deaf people, and looked for other gigs on the side. "At that time, I didn't have an agent," she said, "so I used to get jobs through Facebook."

Ayling-Ellis said she was first "noticed" after being cast in a BBC miniseries called Summer of Rockets a role that landed her representation. She went on to appear in the long-running British soap opera Eastenders, which she described as "my film school for two years."

Since winning Strictly Come Dancing, Ayling-Ellis said she had "felt a responsibility to try and educate people, to shift their minds in how they see deaf people."

She has presented several documentaries about deafness and published a children’s book, Marvelous Messages, which highlights what she called "the many other ways" of communicating "that are not speaking or listening." The book also includes inspiring deaf figures from history, like stuntwoman Kitty O'Neil.

When Ayling-Ellis was growing up, deaf role models were scarce, she said: "Helen Keller? Great lady! She's blind and deaf and a Victorian woman. But I’m not relating."

Ayling-Ellis said she had begun noticing that her TV work was having an impact - not just for deaf people, but among hearing audiences, too. "Lately, I'm starting to see people signing to me more," she said. "I think they're a bit more excited about meeting deaf people, rather than terrified of getting it wrong." – ©2025 The New York Times Company