Kayleigh Llewellyn

To save up for drama school, Kayleigh had two jobs – working front of house at the London Palladium and selling cut price theatre tickets on Leicester Square. But once she graduated and started auditioning, she found herself itching to tweak the scripts that were coming in and realised that perhaps she wanted to be behind the camera more than in front of it. However, by performing improv on stages around London, Kayleigh says her need for attention still gets fulfilled.

Kayleigh is a very collaborative scriptwriter and actively encourages actors to improvise with her scripts, saying it helps to make the dialogue feel more naturalistic. She believes this is the golden age of television and loves to tell dark stories pierced with laughter. Her series In My Skin, based on a pilot for BBC3, draws on her personal experience of coping with her mother’s mental health issues and an upcoming collaboration with The Split’s Abi Morgan tells the story of how Kayleigh lost six family members ‪in 355 days.

She sees BAFTA as the seal of approval given to people doing well in their field and acknowledges that they have been huge supporters of her career already, and a great resource helping her to learn her craft.