Former Strictly Come Dancing champion Rose Ayling-Ellis has said she got her role in Doctor Who thanks to The Traitors presenter Claudia Winkleman. The 30-year-old said her guest appearance in The Well episode of the BBC sci-fi series earlier this year, which was rewritten for her, was a dream come true in an interview with Big Issue.
She said: “Doctor Who was on my bucket list. I really wanted to be on it, I saw Russell T Davies at an awards ceremony and Claudia Winkleman forced me to speak to him.
“So it’s thanks to Claudia that I got the job. It was already written, so they changed it to make her a deaf character, but that’s great. I don’t want every character to be defined by their deafness.”
in the interview, Ayling-Ellis also shared her concerns over government welfare cuts to disability benefits announced earlier this year. She explained: “My big issue at the moment is the cuts to disability benefit, that’s such an important issue for so many people.
“There’s a lot of fear around. Rather than making cuts, they need to support disabled people better.
“People making (benefit) assessments need to have better disability awareness. I remember mine years ago, they wanted a telephone call to assess my need for Disability Living Allowance.
“I’m deaf, I can’t hear you on the phone, and if I’d talked through an interpreter, they would say I can live independently and I’d have got nothing.”
The ex-EastEnders star is now preparing to take on the lead role in ITV detective thriller Code Of Silence, which she is also an executive producer on.
Speaking about her new role, she said: “I’m not doing the producer job because I’m famous or whatever, I’m doing it because I’m deaf and I do all this extra work anyway.
“Every single project I do, I have to be the one saying, ‘can we make sure we do this?’, I always get that responsibility.
“So I wanted to be involved from the beginning of the process and not leave it all until the first day on set.”
The full interview with Ayling-Ellis can be found in this week’s Big Issue, available from local vendors, and online at bigissue.com.
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