Not many people can say they know what it’s like to get smashed over the head with a lamp by Keira Knightley. But Ella Lily Hyland can. “So surreal,” says the 26-year-old Irish actor, who can be seen sparring with the Love Actually star in Netflix’s new thriller, Black Doves. In the scene, Hyland is one half of an assassin duo trying to take down Knightley’s spy, but then Ben Whishaw shows up and obliterates Hyland’s sidekick with a shotgun. Everyone ends up covered in blood and guts, and Hyland, defeated, jumps out of a window and runs away. “I brought my friend to a screening,” she says, “and right before that scene, I told him, ‘Watch me beat the s***e outta her,’ and afterwards he was like, ‘You really didn’t.’” She laughs, head in hands. “Keira completely won. I was raging, actually.”
As you can probably tell, Black Doves is not your usual espionage fare. It is zany, over the top and, frankly, nonsensical. But it’s fun. And while it’s intriguing to see Knightley and Whishaw play gun-toting killers, it’s Hyland’s deadpan performance as Williams, an east-London-hipster-slash-bloodthirsty-psychopath, that steals the show. “You’re gonna cut my c*** off, aren’t you?” Whishaw asks her as he digs into his eggs and soldiers one morning. “Not straight away,” comes her smiling reply. Later, wearing a tinsel halo on her head, Williams slits a man’s throat to the sound of “pa rum pum pum pum” from Christmas carol “The Little Drummer Boy”.
“It was fun,” Hyland says of filming. “And it was so far away from me, so it felt like a bit of craic – one of those jobs where you could be really unserious and play with the character.” We meet in a central London hotel, and Hyland is still recovering after seeing a famous man in the hallway. She can’t remember his name, but tells me she said hello to him very emphatically on her way in. She also apologises for the red wine stains splashed across her skirt, from a recent birthday trip to Paris. “I was worried you’d think I was on my period!”
Hyland is ebullient company, all warmth, no filter, and stories of relatable high jinks. She based her Black Doves assassin on Love Island star Maura Higgins, who became famous for saying filthy things on the reality show. “I felt like Williams had that vibe, but then they put me in a tracksuit and gave me a little fringe, so I didn’t look like Maura at all, but she does have the same accent as me. And she’s so like all the people I grew up with. They speak in a certain way… It’s that dirty sexualisation of everything.”
The actor, who grew up in Carlow in Ireland, relished the rare opportunity to use her own accent for Black Doves. Next year, Hyland will be seen playing posh English in the BBC’s Agatha Christie adaptation Towards Zero. And people in the industry keep assuming she’s a Brit ever since her breakout role last year in Fifteen Love, in which she appeared as a young English tennis star who’s groomed by her coach. “I really don’t want people to think I’m English,” she says. “I want people to know.”
Fifteen Love marked an auspicious start to Hyland’s TV career. It was her first small screen appearance, and she was leading a big, glossy Amazon Prime drama opposite Aidan Turner. If there were nerves, it didn’t show. As a young woman whose adolescence is ripped away from her, she more than holds her own, delivering every nuance in an electrifying performance that is by turns bruised, bitter and obsessive. Not for nothing did The Guardian call her “mesmerising”. And for it to be something with a social conscience was even better. After the drama aired, Hyland got a strong response from viewers who had been through similar things. “I had a few really powerful moments with people,” she says. “I had a girl come up to me who I’d worked with, who’d been through something really similar with a coach, and she said it helped her to heal. I was so glad to hear that because it’s such a fragile subject. You really have to get it right.”
If things had been different, Hyland might have ended up a sports star herself. Her grandfather Dinny Hyland was a record-breaking Irish pole vaulter and her dad would take her to training in pole vaulting and high jump. “I was literally the most ADHD child,” she says. “I would start things and then run away from them. There was no part of me that wanted to be a professional athlete, but I was good at it and it ran in my family. But I was a nightmare for my da. He’d be like, ‘Where is she?’ And I’d be pure smoking rollies in the car park.”
Hyland didn’t enjoy school. “I went to an all girls school first, and got in trouble a lot and then it was, er, suggested that I leave.” She gives a butter-wouldn’t-melt look, then turns serious. “I had a really hard time in school actually. I think I was quite overwhelmed with the amount of subjects and I was very hyper and just didn’t really fit into the system, I don’t feel. I was suspended nearly every year. The second school I went to was a mixed school and that was much better for me. We did a play there and they looked after me a little bit more.” Speaking about Carlow, which is in the southeast of Ireland, she says, “There’s not a politeness to the town, there’s a rawness. People are able to speak their mind and fight and argue. I was definitely more like that as a teenager, but I’ve softened a bit now so I don’t get in trouble.”
The first time Hyland ever felt committed to something, she says, is when she started acting. She was hanging out in her mum’s hair salon one day after school when some older girls came in and said they were going to the local youth theatre. She went with them, paying her €2 entry fee, and was hooked. After leaving school, she moved to Dublin to train at the Lir Academy, where she was a few years below Normal People’s Paul Mescal and made best friends with Alison Oliver, star of the BBC’s second Sally Rooney adaptation, Conversations with Friends. “I loved it so much there,” she says. “It was like coming home to yourself. It was the best time, especially coming from school where I just thought I would never fit into a system, and then suddenly I was accepted in such a huge way.”
Hyland’s been writing a feature film, Fenna, about drug in Ireland. She will star in it; Oliver will produce. She’s excited about the future, and is inspired by the Irish actors and writers making waves across the world, from the younger Lir alumni to Sharon Horgan, Lisa McGee and Cillian Murphy. “I look up to so many of those people, and when I watch interviews with them and try to learn from them, I can see their humility and soundness and willingness to share,” she says. “And that, I think, is very ingrained in Irish.”
‘Black Doves’ is out now on Netflix