Intense psychological drama Fifteen-Love sees the former Poldark play a top coach accused of abuse. He and co-star Ella Lily Hyland talk lucky tattoos, Tom Cruise – and Turner’s weirdest talents
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.”
