Ella Ironside

Ella is one of the enterprising young people in our SEED (Self Employment and Entrepreneurial Development) Programme. A self-employed actor, here she explains on her own words how GrowBiz helped her get where she wanted to be:

Hi, I’m Ella, I’m 24 and I’m a self-employed actor from Perthshire.

I graduated drama school in 2022, and traditionally when you’re leaving you want to try and find yourself an agent to help find you work and represent you. Unfortunately, that didn’t quite go to plan, and didn’t happen for me, and so I moved up to Edinburgh and took part in a two woman show, that we didn’t only produce ourselves but went on to have a two week run at the Edinburgh Fringe festival. At the beginning of the year I was still self represented and knew that if I wanted to be taken seriously as an actor, I would have to start thinking of myself as if I was running a business, which was completely new territory for me.

This is when I was introduced to a company called GrowBiz, who have this fantastic project called SEED. This is where it’s aimed to help young people in and around Perthshire who are looking to start and develop their own businesses. I was assigned a one-on-one mentor and they were fantastic at answering all the really difficult questions that I had.

Thinking of yourself as an actor as well as a business owner is very opposing mindsets—your taking your real personal passion and coupling it with what’s expected of you as a small business owner—and they gave fantastic advice, from financial, of how to physically set yourself up as self employed, looking at taxes, making sure they’re not as scary as they seem, and, you know, to the marketing side and how to sell yourself in a very busy, overcrowded industry.

After having a few discussions, we came to the conclusion of the best goals that I wanted for my business, was to have a show reel. Now, a show reel is a short film that consists of three or four different scenes that showcases your best talent as an actor. And this was a real precedent for my career—I started acting when I was 14 and I went to Perth Youth Theatre every week simply because I loved it, and now we were talking seriously about doing this full time.

After an application process I was awarded a grant from GrowBiz that allowed me to go and film a fully fledged professional show reel. I carried out market research, created concepts of characters and sourced a company that would make this all possible. After a long development process and a full day filming I finally had a product I was proud to showcase, and this is all thanks to the support from SEED.

After filming my show reel I applied to many agencies. Rejection is just part of this industry, but it doesn’t make it any easier when you’re just hearing ‘no’ over and over and over again! But after a couple of months I got a call from an agency that they’d like to sign me. That was a very exciting moment and a huge step forward, and one that I definitely couldn’t have taken without SEED—their support had been so valuable.

I’m now a working actor who’s auditioning for roles, and I just appeared in a commercial for STV. I am forever grateful for SEED, and just really excited to see what the future holds.

Ella recently won a best dramatic performance award with her showreel. She says:

I worked with the company back in July last year and it was one day filled with filming of 3 original showreels that were tailored to myself. I didn’t even realise that there was an award until I received an email saying I had been nominated, which was a surprise! There was a panel of agents/casting directors/ producers all of which played a part in making the decision. I found out a few weeks later that I had won it alongside another actor!