Ayling-Ellis said the scripts on the soap are often “not quite right” and scenes are “not realistic at all”.
EastEnders star Rose Ayling-Ellis has said that her character on the soap, Frankie Lewis, “is either written as a hearing person or as a deaf stereotype”, in a lecture given at the Edinburgh International TV Festival 2022.
Ayling-Ellis was giving the Alternative MacTaggart Lecture where she said that while on set for EastEnders, she is “almost always working with scripts that are written by hearing people” and that “it can be frustrating, playing a hearing person’s perception of what a deaf person is like”.
While she said she is “grateful” for the role which has given her “lots of opportunities”, and that “being the first deaf person to play a regular character is a huge privilege and was long overdue”, she added that scripts on the soap are often “not quite right”.
She said that her character is often written as being in a room “with a big group of people arguing with each other, following everything that is being said and even repeating things back to them”.
“Or they will write my character as lipreading someone from impossibly far away, like I have a superpower, which is not realistic at all!”
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Ayling-Ellis said that she has “asked countless times for a deaf consultant to be brought in to work with the writing teams, to help advise on ways to incorporate and respect deaf culture,” yet due to the speed of the show and a high staff turnover, “the importance of consultants is often forgotten”.
She also said: “Even though I am not paid to do the extra work on top of my job, I try to fix the problem on set and a lot of the time people are very supportive and make changes based on my advice.
“But the problem is, it doesn’t get added to the script. So, when it comes to editing, the editor follows the original script and the changes I make are left out of the final cut. This isn’t a one off, it happens to me every week.”
Ayling-Ellis said that she has started to see “small changes” working on the show, as she has been invited into the writers room to make sure scenes are realistic, but adds “it shouldn’t have taken me two years of repeating my frustrations, using up my time and energy, to get to a point where I feel able to demand that my needs are met”.
Ayling Ellis announced she was leaving the soap earlier this month, saying at the time: “It’s been incredibly special to be EastEnders’ first regular deaf actor. I have loved my time on the show and Frankie has been such an awesome character to play, however now feels like the right time for me to move on and I am excited and ready for new challenges.”
RadioTimes.com has reached out to EastEnders for comment.
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