When Rose Ayling-Ellis is lip reading, she’s guessing most of the time.
“You can get the shape of a mouth,” she said recently, but to understand what someone is saying, context is everything. “You have to pick up body language, the mood, the vibe,” she said.
Ayling-Ellis, 30, said that learning to lip read had been “a survival technique.” The actress, who was born deaf, speaks and also uses British Sign Language, and was aided in an interview by an interpreter. In the TV crime thriller “Code of Silence,” which arrives on BritBox on July 24, Ayling-Ellis plays a deaf woman who is recruited by the police to eavesdrop discreetly.
In the show, as in life, she said, lip reading is “like a puzzle.”
When Ayling Ellis’s character, Alison, watches CCTV footage of suspected gang members, she scrutinizes their facial expressions and observes how they stand. Like any good detective, Alison must study the scene, piecing together clues. In a clever visual conceit, jumbled subtitles appear onscreen and gradually unscramble as she decodes each se
