– and Hizli would be playing the local village’s queen bee. But after she filmed the pilot, Cooper ghosted her. It wasn’t until the show came out on the BBC, to universal acclaim and with no sign of Hizli, that she twigged her character had been cut. Cooper, being “notoriously quite flaky and non-confrontational”, as Hizli puts it, had been too scared to tell her.
She had been waiting a long time for it. From a young age, acting has been Hizli’s escape. Born to an Irish mother and Turkish father, and raised in Oxford, Turkey and finally Hertfordshire, she describes her childhood as “up and down”. “Having a volatile home life and money struggles and stuff, was the thing that got me praise… that people were like, ‘Wow, you’re good at that.’”
“It’s something that comes up all the time,” Hizli says. “I think the reason Daisy and I still talk about it now is because… I was absolutely chomping at the bit to go there and I just felt like the rug just got pulled from me again and again.” Inside Rada, a new idea was instilled: “There’s a right and wrong way of doing this, and you are doing it wrong.”