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[ Text Only: Homepage ]
[ Graphical: Channel4 Homepage ]
The adopted child of hearing parents, Mel is partially deaf and not happy about it. To her, the Deaf world is a ghetto and she has no intention of getting trapped in it. Her way out is to choose hearing boyfriends and to develop her ability to function in the hearing world. When she's feeling insecure, she hunts out weakness in others and exploits it. Too much fast living means she neglects her work at college.
'I find my character interesting because it's a real challenge to play a mean, bitchy woman,' says Sarah Beauvoisin. 'Mel faces a lot of problems in the Deaf community. She doesn't want to be deaf (which was very hard for me to understand). Mel drinks a lot and hangs around in the hearing community. She usually gets what she wants. She is always trying to please her friends, but it doesn't always work because she is so self-centred. She won't admit that she has a problem with her identity and isolation.'
Mel is a spoken role, and Sarah says it is a big challenge to get the intonation and pronunciation right all the time, especially when Mel is being emotional.
'I enjoyed the filming immensely because I learned what is happening behind the camera and how the filming works,' she told VEE-TV online. 'It was more special this time, as we had a deaf director, Ray Harrison Graham, who also wrote the script.
'What I didn't enjoy was getting up really early. Also I didn't enjoy filming outside in the freezing cold, especially at night-time, wearing a minimal amount of clothes. It was hard to pretend that I wasn't that cold.'
Sarah's acting credits include Louis Neethling's short film Dis?able, a Channel 5 children's animation, Jay Jay The Jet Plane, Harrison Graham's production of The Dreamcatcher, the Graeae Theatre's children's play Message in a Bottle and a BBC Radio 4 solo drama, Nobody's Perfect. She has also taken the lead role in Interplay Theatre's Stepping Stones and Children of a Lesser God, for which she won an award.
Graphic version
Includes layout and images.