Tanya Reynolds, Sex Education’s oddball who found a straight face in Ted Lasso

Tanya Reynolds

Photo: Raph_PH / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 4, 1991 Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Emma., Harold and the Purple Crayon, Fanny Lye Deliver'd
Awards	Screen International Stars of Tomorrow · Kino London Short Film Festival

For most of her screen career, Tanya Reynolds has been hired to play the woman who has misread the room. Lily Iglehart in Sex Education wrote alien erotica and announced her plans to anyone within earshot. Mrs Elton in Emma. talked over the whole of Highbury. Caroline Bingley in The Other Bennet Sister is Jane Austen’s resident snob. Then came a part that asks for close to the opposite. Alice Chilton, the assistant coach who arrives in the fourth season of Ted Lasso, is a former footballer whose playing days ended with one knee injury too many, and Reynolds plays her with a straight face and no visible effort to be liked. The deadpan works. The open question is what she does with the other project she has been building: a feature she wrote and is directing herself, about a woman who wants to stop being a person for a while.

Nothing about her background pointed at the stage. Her father is a builder; her mother worked as a sign writer and paints. Reynolds, who is half English and half Italian, was born in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, on 4 November 1991. She was the first in her family to go to university, at Royal Holloway, University of London, and has recalled phoning her father in tears after her first seminar because she felt so out of her depth. She stayed. Drama school came next, at the Oxford School of Drama, on a fully funded scholarship; she has pointed out that many drama students come from high-income families, and the scholarship was what made the fees possible. She graduated in 2015.

The discovery that shaped everything came in a clowning class she was, by her own account, judgmental about. “I put that red nose on and the clown in me, she just happened,” she told the Observer. People laughed, and she found out that her face and the way she moved were funny. The first jobs were short films, among them Civilised People by the comedy duo In Cahoots, shown at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Television followed in 2016 with twelve episodes of the Sky One series Delicious as Teresa Benelli, opposite Dawn French and Iain Glen, then guest parts in Outlander, as Lady Isobel Dunsany, in the BBC thriller Rellik and in Death in Paradise. On film she held a leading role in Thomas Clay’s seventeenth-century drama Fanny Lye Deliver’d, alongside Maxine Peake and Charles Dance.

Netflix’s Sex Education changed the scale. Lily began as a recurring character in the first season in 2019 and was promoted to the main cast for the second and third. The same run of luck brought Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. in 2020, where her Mrs Elton, all bright aggression, held her own beside Anya Taylor-Joy and Bill Nighy, and Screen International named her one of its Stars of Tomorrow that year. She also played in Scenes with Girls at the Royal Court, which she has called one of her favourite working experiences. In 2022 came Queen Victoria in Dodger, with Christopher Eccleston as Fagin, the horror comedy The Baby and the Channel 4 sitcom I Hate You. In 2024 she was Licisca in Netflix’s The Decameron, a servant who, as Reynolds put it, “completely unshackles herself from any restraints”, and Meg in Alice Lowe’s Timestalker.

The stage has been where she gets the longer arguments. “I only started to get seen for theatre after Sex Education,” she has said, and the theatre then moved fast. She played Kate Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer at the Orange Tree Theatre in 2023, and Mei in Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror, first at the Almeida and then in its West End transfer to the Trafalgar Theatre with Jonny Lee Miller, which earned her a 2024 Olivier nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. In 2025 she created Mariella in Ava Pickett’s 1536 at the Almeida, a play about three village women living through the fall of Anne Boleyn.

That split is the awkward part of her career. The stage has trusted her with drama and with ambiguity; the screen has mostly asked for the comic foil, often in a corset. Two Austen snobs in six years, Mrs Elton and Caroline Bingley, is a pattern. Television has also moved on without her at odd moments. She did not return for the fourth and final season of Sex Education, so the series that introduced her to a global audience closed without her, and no public explanation was given. Even the Ted Lasso casting, which drew some of her warmest notices, carries a risk: one review said she “injects a wholly unique energy into the ensemble”, and a deadpan that good can harden into the next type.

The year 2026 has been her busiest. The Other Bennet Sister premiered on BBC One on 15 March, with Reynolds as Caroline Bingley. From May to August she was back in 1536 for its West End run at the Ambassadors Theatre, reprising Mariella under Lyndsey Turner’s direction. On 5 August the fourth season of Ted Lasso launched on Apple TV, with Jason Sudeikis’s coach now in charge of a women’s team at AFC Richmond. Alice, introduced in the second episode, wanted the head coaching job and settled for working beside Ted. TVLine singled out her chemistry with Hannah Waddingham.

Her interviews suggest a performer who goes looking for other people to be. She has said that she is much more comfortable being someone else than being herself. She has also said she always felt directing was something she could never do, until she watched Alice Lowe write and direct Timestalker with “all this calm energy”.

Next comes a stunt that suits her. On 24 October she is the guest performer in Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree at The Other Palace in London, a play in which the second actor walks on stage without ever having read or rehearsed the script. After that, the real test: Dog Person, her first feature as writer and director, in which she also stars alongside James Norton and Hugh Bonneville. Produced by Western Edge Pictures, the company behind Timestalker, it follows a 33-year-old dental receptionist whose encounter with a new dentist wakes a desire she did not know she had. “I wanted to make a film about the desire to stop being a person, even if just for a little bit,” Reynolds said when it was announced. No release date has been set. When it arrives, it will be the first time she has written the oddball herself.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Hannah Waddingham, Ted Lasso, Tanya Reynolds, Dog Person

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