Ella Lily Hyland on playing killers in Black Doves and Tall Tales & Murder: 'I have to surrender to it'

Ask Ella Lily Hyland what it is about her that gets her cast as killers – as the assassin-for-hire Williams in Black Doves and now as Bridget, a care home nurse with a flair for euthanasia in Tall Tales & Murder – and she’ll scrunch her face, think for a moment and then gingerly venture, “Maybe a natural intensity…”

Is she asking or telling? “I really don’t know. Scorpio, though, so…”

Star signs notwithstanding, Joe Barton, creator and writer of Black Doves (which returns for a second series this week; see page 12), has thought about what Hyland brings to a part. “Ella’s both a force of nature and a ray of sunshine, and it’s always a good day when she’s on set,” he says. “Working with her reminds me of when you see a preternaturally gifted footballer show up out of nowhere, like watching a young Gareth Bale carve up Inter Milan. She makes it seem joyful and effortless. She still has that thing where she seems genuinely excited and happy to be getting to do this job that she loves, and her enthusiasm is infectious.”

And so to Bridget, Tall Tales & Murder’s compassionate but melancholy and thus compelling protagonist. Written by Stuart Carolan, creator of the Irish gangster drama Love/Hate (available on ITVX) and directed by comedian Chris Addison, Tall Tales & Murder is what Hyland calls “an adult fable”.

A nurse at an Irish care home, Bridget is so loved by her wards that they ask her to help them end their lives, and so kind that she can’t not help them. It’s clear from her drug use and large library of books that Bridget is also broken somehow.

The arrival in the care home of another lost soul, petty criminal Paul (Casey Walsh), coupled with a seismic event in her otherwise humdrum life, starts a chain of events that transforms Bridget and initiates a misfits’ love story.

Hyland’s path to the part was unusual. The Irish casting director Maureen Hughes (“such a mentor to me when I left drama school”) sent her two scenes from the script to tape and send to Carolan. A dinner in London with Carolan and Addison followed – all long before anyone knew whether the show would be made. “They said, ‘We’d like you to play Bridget.’ I was thrilled. I’d never been in that position before where you’re at the nucleus of a project. The dreaded thing always as an actor is, will I ever work? So I kind of knew that was there. It was a great comfort.”

It would be another year before the project got anywhere near a green light and the rest of the cast was brought aboard. Hyland and Bridget were Tall Tales & Murder’s north star; the whole show pivots around them.

Taking her role seriously, Hyland prepared for months. She researched addiction, down to which drugs Bridget takes and in what combination, “though it’s not a social realism piece”. She spoke to nurses and listened to podcasts. In the end, she says, “You do all this stuff, and not all of it matters. You have to let go and surrender to it.”

Bridget’s trajectory is what makes her so attractive and, it has to be said, unusual for a female character. “Sometimes I feel we leave the mess up to the men in storytelling and women are the caretakers. Bridget has that beautiful duality where she’s a bit of a mess but she’s also very caring. It’s such fun to play her.”

That said, she notes, “You don’t want to be mad for mad’s sake. I didn’t want Bridget to be just kooky and crazy. She needs escapism, through the books. She’s contained in the nursing home, and then taken on an adventure she’d never expect.” A second series is in the offing, but she has no idea what’s in store.

For all the darkness, Hyland doesn’t find the work troubling. “I don’t think I’d be interested in work that didn’t have a darkness.” Storytelling, in her view, “lightens things that are very difficult to talk about in real life, not by making them light but by literally shining a light on them. They help us process the shadowy aspects of being a human.”

Does she agree that even in the most hopeless stories there can be a hopefulness in the storytelling? In The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov, the hope isn’t in the story on stage, it’s in the auditorium, in the audience recognising that their feelings – of despair, heartbreak, grief – are felt by other people. “If community is taken out of storytelling, it just doesn’t mean anything. Actors and acting aren’t meant to be on a pedestal. It’s about everyone being on the same eye level, saying, ‘Let’s look at each other.’ ”

Hyland’s sense of community starts in Carlow, the town in Ireland where she grew up and which she left aged 17 for drama school in Dublin. She remembers the bus home passing the Abbey Theatre, and wanting to act there one day. Her first professional job was on that stage. “I really felt it at the time. I thought, this is mad.”

Earlier still was her grandad, “a really quiet man” who would delight in her pretending to be his friend come to call, putting on his jacket and taking his stick. “It’s not about admiration, although that’s the shadow of our work. It’s the joy it evokes and the entertainment that comes with sharing it.” That said, “It’s not as joyful if you’re sitting at home in your room doing monologues.” Hyland is, she confesses, terrible at self-taping.

She enjoys writing, though. A film, sparked by a commission for Carlow Arts Festival and begun when she left college, draws on “the people who reared me” and what she hears as the poetry in how they speak. It follows a young woman whose mother has died of an overdose, and it is about addiction and intergenerational trauma. It’s a subject that, Hyland says, she feels “a lot of empathy for. Addiction affects many corners of the community I’m from, and what I find heartbreaking is why it can’t be helped, and how the lack of access affects things.”

Access or the lack thereof – to healthcare, to education, to unlocking potential – is something that preoccupies Hyland. “Going to college at 17, I always felt very strongly about the difference between the world I was leaving and the world I was going to. I suppose I feel a sense of grief for the community I come from but don’t live in any more. There’s an estrangement from the people who raised you and gave you your way of speaking. It changes over years of doing plays and learning to pronounce your Ts. And there’s a weird guilt about leaving to follow your dream. Because you can never go back.”

The conversation naturally arrives at class, which, she says, is more restrictive in Ireland than Irish people would care to admit. “I don’t think we’re able to talk about it. Irish people find it really hard to look at themselves.”

Hyland admires the Scottish writer Darren McGarvey, whose recent work argues that trauma and authenticity have been commodified. “People in the minority almost have to give in to that capitalist structure in order to be heard, and they’re not allowed to be uncertain.” Artists, she says, are meant to ask questions, not hand out answers.

“Everyone’s afraid. You don’t have to tie it up in a bow for there to be hope. Sometimes it just needs to be there in the uncertainty.”