Welsh star reveals she once dreamed of playing rugby for Wales

Amelia Jones

Peaky Blinders and Slow Horses star Aimee-Ffion Edwards has revealed how she dreamed of playing rugby for Wales before finding fame as an actress.

Edwards, who grew up in Newport, spoke about her sporting ambitions and Welsh upbringing in a new interview with The Guardian.

The fluent Welsh speaker attended a Welsh-language school and played rugby for a local youth side, where she was the only girl on the boys’ team until the age of 14.

She would often go straight from ballet lessons to rugby matches and said that, at the time, she had her sights set on representing Wales.

That ambition eventually became a reality when she was selected to play for Wales, although her international career consisted of just one match.

Rather than continuing with rugby, Edwards decided she had achieved what she had set out to do and turned her attention to acting, and she later joined the National Youth Theatre of Wales. This led to her first major role as ‘Sketch’ in Channel 4’s Skins.

She told The Guardian: “I played one match for Wales. Then I was like, ‘I’ve done that. I think I’m going to do some acting.’”

Her rugby background has proved useful in her acting career too, particularly through her role as Shirley Dander in Slow Horses. The character is one of the members of the disgraced MI5 team based at Slough House and is known for her unpredictable nature, with Edwards taking on a number of physically demanding scenes throughout the series.

She has previously explained that playing rugby gave her a certain fearlessness when it came to physical work on screen. That has included performing a stunt in which Shirley jumps from a nightclub balcony onto a suspect, something Edwards had to repeat several times while filming.

Now Edwards is returning as Shirley for the sixth series of Slow Horses, the Apple TV+ spy drama starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. The latest series sees the Slough House agents caught up in another dangerous mission, with Shirley dealing with the aftermath of the death of her close friend and colleague Marcus.

While Slow Horses has helped establish Edwards as an internationally recognised actor, her Welsh roots remain an important part of her career. She has increasingly taken on roles and projects that allow her to draw on her Welsh identity and language, including playing Cis, the sister of Richard Burton, in the film Mr Burton.

She is also set to lend her voice to one of the most recognisable characters in cinema history, as Princess Leia in the first Welsh-language dub of Star Wars: A New Hope. The production, titled Star Wars: Gobaith Newydd, is due to air on S4C, with Edwards joined by fellow Welsh actors including Matthew Rhys and Rhys Ifans.

She also uses her Welsh accent in Slow Horses, saying that it’s important to normalise her accent as she feels it is often not used on screens often enough.

She added: “We hear northern and other accents all the time, but Welsh accents have been underrepresented.”

Slow Horses Season 6 will return on 23 September. You can watch previous series on Apple TV+.

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