The world of elite sport is made for drama. It’s moneyed and photogenic, buzzing with jeopardy and endlessly sorts people into winners and loser. But Fifteen-Love, the new six-parter starring Aidan Turner and newcomer Ella Lily Hyland, has a very specific dramatic angle: the wild blindspot in the law over the safeguarding of minors. “I’m still baffled by it,” Turner tells me over Zoom from the Cotswolds. “If you’re a doctor or a carer or a teacher, it’s illegal for you to have a relationship with a person in your care who’s under 18. But there used to be this crazy loophole that it didn’t apply to coaches.”
This is the backdrop on to which the show projects a drama of multiple, shape-shifting ambiguities – one which it can be hard to categorise. “Where do you place the genre of Fifteen-Love?”, Turner asks me. I actually don’t know. I can tell you what it’s about: a young player, Justine (Hyland), making a historical accusation of grooming and sexual assault against her coach, Turner’s character, Glenn. But it is hard to pin down; it starts out like wealth porn, moves into mystery, has political shades but remains carefully ambiguous, both in the he-said/she-said puzzle that drives the plot, and in its tone, which is full of deceptively cheerful interactions – almost blindfolding the viewer into a darker place. “It’s usually an easy thing to do with any movie,” Turner continues, “you dip your toe into it, you know what genre it is, even if it’s opaque, you can imagine where it sits, what demographic, roughly, would watch it. It is strange to send it all into the ether and not know how it will land in the world.”
It’s eight years since Turner’s 2015 primetime breakthrough, so high impact that he’s still routinely captioned “PoldarkHeartthrobAidanTurner”, and he’s now 40. It was a lot of things, his performance in that show, but it wasn’t subtle or confusing; as Glenn, he is so smooth and collected that it’s almost alienating how effortlessly he moves through the world. But are you, the viewer, right to be alienated? It’s genuinely hard to tell; there is nuance in this performance that you don’t even realise until a while after you’ve watched it. That’s what he was going for, he says, that tightrope: “Are you grooming younger players at the Tennis Academy and that’s why you’re there? Are you there because you’re a great coach and you love teaching kids? Is it both? Are you a great dad and a great husband? Are you a monster and a sociopath? It was a constant juggle. Some of the characters I’ve played recently, it’s more simple to define where their morals and their ethics lie. There’s something they need to decide, or something they need to learn, and then there’s a big revelation, but this is a similar sort of track that every romantic lead takes.”
Sure, it’s not the first part he’s taken to slough off his romantic-lead reputation, but it’s definitely a decisive stride away from that. “You can only play romantic leads for so long. The older you get, the tougher it is to play those roles. There’s not a lot to them, either.”
Hyland’s performance is remarkable. It throws up all the counter questions – is she a fantasist or telling the truth? Does she have a personality disorder or PTSD? It’s full of an instinctive, raw energy that has the uncontrolled charisma of an actor in complete control, despite her being almost straight out of the Lir, the national academy of dramatic art in Dublin. Her degree was semi-poleaxed by Covid and she also had one of her first roles, at the Cork Midsummer festival, cut short by the pandemic. It was, in short, a nightmare time to train to be an actor – not least due to being robbed of an audience.
“Oh my god, we need people,” she says. “It’s not even a thing about being an introvert or an extrovert. It’s sharing: any form of art, you want to share it, you want to connect.” Despite her tricky training, she seems much more experienced than she possibly can be. “I did get impostor syndrome,” she says, “wondering whether I was ready for it. But everyone is so kind, everyone wants you to do a good job. And it happened so fast, you’re in the flow of it and don’t have a lot of time to think.”
Real-life Hyland is surprisingly quiet and reflective, after her perfectionist, highly strung performance. She has a tattoo on her arm saying 22: I’m not sure what the etiquette is with asking Gen Z what their tattoos mean, but I ask anyway, and she says, “I actually got it in 2022. And I was 22.” Baffling. Why stop there? Why not have all the numbers? “It’s also my lucky number.” Was it, by any chance, to commemorate getting cast in Fifteen-Love? She says she’s almost certain that it wasn’t, but then works backwards and agrees that 22 does make a convincing case as the year she got her big break.
One of the most distinctive things about Fifteen-Love is its aesthetic. “There’s a lot of colour saturation. There was lots of flaring the lens while we were shooting, to make this idyllic world,” Turner says. “There’s a great beauty to the show, an innocence to it, and when it’s punctured, you can really see the hole – and everything flying out.”
People who like tennis are really going to love all the tennis, and there’s a backdrop of wholesome athleticism contrasting, rather poetically, with the foreground of maybe-maybe-not sexual exploitation. They both look pretty good at tennis, incidentally, though Hyland says she’s not, they just CGId the ball in to make her look good, and Turner says, “I played badminton for my school. I’m great at table tennis on holidays and figured there would be some sort of correlation between all racket sports. But there isn’t. It’s so very different.” He will eventually concede, “I’m a fairly athletic person. I have some weird talents. I’m a champion ballroom dancer. I can speak some French. I can horse ride.” He actually has an amazing skillset, the kind actors put on their CVs and then panic when they’re called on it. He’s not allowed to show it off very often, unfortunately. “Whenever you want to do a Tom Cruise [who famously does his own stunts], you see four really sweaty executive producers thinking ‘we don’t want you to fall on that ankle. It’s gonna cost us’. It’s the ego versus executives, insurance companies and pockets.”
Turner does, at least, get to show off one of his skills in his latest production. The reason he’s in the Cotswolds is that he’s currently filming Jilly Cooper’s finest work (I believe), Rivals, featuring no shortage of horseback scenes. “What a cool job. I get to jump on this horse, ride, have a lovely lunch. And then get a driver back to a flat someone else has paid for.”
It can’t all be plain sailing, though. Thanks to the writers’ strike in the US, production will most likely slow down. He does, however, have sympathy with the reasons for their industrial action, including streaming services leading to wage erosion and the rise of artificial intelligence. “There was an AI-generated first draft script, it was just mocked up in seconds,” says Turner, talking theoretically. “And then a team of writers was taken on to do a polished draft. Those drafts cost a lot less, take a lot less time, and you don’t get the same rights as the show goes forward.”
Given that actors will probably come out in solidarity with writers, again, in the US, might Turner join them? He chortles at the thought of himself and his co-stars from Rivals and Fifteen-Love, “can you imagine, myself David Tennant and Anna Chancellor, with our placards?” before correcting to sincerity: “Unions are still really important. I don’t know if Equity over here is quite as strong as the Screen Actors Guild in America, but it’s still important to be in it.”
Hyland’s next gig she’s not at liberty to discuss – all she can say is that she’s had to dye her hair mousy for it. “I’m telling everyone I’m having an identity crisis, and they’re like: ‘it’s just hair’.” Turner would like, ultimately, if not to move into producing, then at least add it to his portfolio. “I don’t want to always wake up at five to go sit in a makeup chair. It would be nice to get up at a reasonable time and get on a laptop, or pick up a telephone. Not having to jump into a silly costume to do my job.” He’s quick to stress, it’s not the job that’s silly, he’s silly. “It’s the most fun job in the world, if you can get work. Good writing like this, it’s not everywhere. The more interesting work, you have to wait around for. You have to fossick around for it.”
Fifteen-Love is available on Prime Video from 21 July.
