Interview with Ella Dorman-Gajic, Writer/Actor of ‘Back of the Net’

Anyone with their eyes on the English fringe theatre scene will know the name Ella Dorman-Gajic – and soon, the rest of you will, too. Following the critical success of her award-winning stage play, Trade, Dorman-Gajic has burst onto the short film scene with her screenwriting debut, Back of the Net. In its time on the UK film festival circuit, Back of the Net has earned a handful of critical Best Of awards for Dorman-Gajic’s storytelling: it was awarded Best Drama at Tottenham Film Festival and Best Screenplay at Healdsburg International, to name a few.

Indeed, Back of the Net, directed by Klara Kaliger, illustrates Dorman-Gajic’s aptitude for complex and empathetic writing. The story follows two generations of female footballers – Maya, portrayed by Dorman-Gajic herself, and her ailing grandmother Maggie (Maureen Casey) – and the interfamilial dynamics they’re forced to navigate in the face of Maggie’s condition. Back of the Net overtly and successfully explores the obligations women often have to each other, and to their own ambitions.

But what renders Back of the Net such masterful storytelling is not what Dorman-Gajic portrays overtly – it’s found in what is not said and done by the rest of Maya’s family, in the disproportionate domestic care the female family members must perform in order to ensure Maggie’s well-being. In fifteen minutes, Dorman-Gajic navigates the gaps and nuances of the family, saying little and showing everything with the finesse of a seasoned screenwriter. Her film debut proves a flexibility across mediums and, in the eyes of a writer, an enviable intuition for hitting the emotional beats of her narrative.

Across her oeuvre, Dorman-Gajic writes three-dimensional female characters with the best of them, following in the tradition of her fellow English playwrights Lucy Prebble and Phoebe-Waller Bridge. Any witness of Dorman-Gajic’s work should have no reason to doubt that her name will reach the same heights of her contemporaries.

In conversation, Dorman-Gajic is bright and beautiful, eager to converse and quick-thinking. We spoke about the twenty-first century female experience, the meaning of writing in the face of generative technology, and the future of Ella Dorman-Gajic, as she sees it. The following conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

I want to talk about Back of the Net: first of all, I want to say congratulations – you have been killing it on the festival circuit! I have to say, when I started looking into you, I got kind of obsessed with you and started reading your Substack, and I found a piece that you wrote, “Writing on Writing”, about the kind of imposter syndrome that every single writer experiences. I remember you writing about recently receiving an award for Back of the Net, and how your self-doubt still exists.

Thank you so much for reading my Substack. Often it can feel like I’m just writing into a void, so it’s really great to know that it’s being received and people are reading it. Yeah, I think it’s this funny thing where the goalposts keep changing; no matter what you achieve, there’s always another thing to be achieved. I think that’s partly working within the arts and within film – we see other people’s achievements so obviously because it’s such a public-facing industry, unlike others, so therefore there’s always another thing that you can achieve! Also, just feeling like, in a strange way, that everything you’ve achieved is a fluke. I know other writers feel this way sometimes. I think it’s because when you meet yourself at your laptop, you’re not always going to be perfect, there’s a lot of rubbish you’ve got to write through to get to the meat and to the good stuff. That’s why I actually encourage writers to just write as much as possible, and to be kind to yourself, and the good will come. You’ve got to have incredible patience to be a writer, both in the creating of the good work, but also in patience within the industry – payoff will come eventually, but it won’t be immediate, especially in film, where it can take years to make. It can take decades to make, sometimes! That’s why I’m actually really grateful for the Substack, that feels like a more immediate way of communicating and writing, even if it’s just writing on writing.

Yeah, you get to write on your own terms a little more. So what was the process like for Back of the Net? When did you start that project?

I started writing Back of the Net in 2022 immediately after the women won the Euro…and immediately this sense of euphoria washed over my body – in a way I’ve never felt about football before! Because it’s such a heavily-gendered thing, and it’s something I always considered more to be masculine…and witnessing women’s communities come together for the Euro in a very warm and community-driven way was something I’ve never seen in relation to football before. So I started looking more into the history of women’s football, and it’s such a rich, fascinating history. In England, the FA banned women’s football in 1921 until 1971 – so there’s a lot of meat to get your teeth stuck into. It came about from researching and thinking about the history of the Lionesses whose stories haven’t been championed at the same level of their male counterparts, which I wanted to explore in a generational thing, matching the Lioness of the past, Maggie, with her granddaughter Maya, which represents and reflects where women’s football is at today. I also joined a grassroots football team myself – the Deptford Ravens, shout-out! – and another one, Bend it Like Peckham…what I was really struck by in these teams was the encouraging community feel, not putting the competitiveness first. I hope that is reflected in the film…not tough-love, Whiplash encouragement, but community. So I started writing it in summer of ‘22, and it didn’t get shot until 2023, and now we’re in 2025!

I can’t congratulate you enough – I loved the short so much, and like we’re talking about, I see all these ways in there that the women in Maya’s life are uplifting her: her team seems very supportive, her coach is willing to put all this elbow grease in to help her get where she wants to be. But I also see that dynamic within the family where the men have really permitted themselves to be absent from any domestic responsibilities, they can do whatever they want, they can be a pro footballer if they want to, but Maya and Connie very much have to design their lives around the caretaking of a family member. I see so much of that in your other work that I’ve explored, the ways in which women are held back from dreaming and aspiring.

Totally. In absolutely everything I write, gender is a massive theme, if not the predominant theme of my work. I mean, it’s the reason I first started wanting to write. I think there are so many fascinating female stories to tell, and the experience of being a woman is very complex. We’ve got this history of being shoved under the carpet, or of domestic responsibilities being assigned to us. What does that mean for aspirations, or of how we inherit the past – even if, on the surface of it, we’ve got rights now? There’s that cultural inherited thing that is still very messy, and the imperfections of being a woman as well. We’re often very flawed characters. In reference to my other work, Back of the Net was my debut on film, but mostly I work in theatre. I wrote a play that went on tour in 2023, and that was similarly about a female protagonist, but it was about being trafficked. It was also about ambition and coming-of-age, and about dreaming big and that being immediately cut short, due to the fact that she is a woman. That is the prevailing theme of my work, female coming-of-age stories.

Knowing that you have such a background in theatre – which really struck me watching Back of the Net, it’s obvious you’re trained as a theatre performer in your expressions and vocalizations – you have such an incredible way of putting yourself in somebody else’s mind and writing from that perspective. I’ve been a young girl too…and when you’re an adolescent girl, I feel like that’s kind of the way you experience the world, right? You see the world from your own two eyeballs, but you start seeing all these subjectivities around you. Not to say that this isn’t an experience for men, too, but I think that’s what so many women writers bring to the table: we start to see how other people see us and the world, because we’re so hyper-aware of what everyone thinks of us all the time. Does that resonate with you?

Yeah, and I understand what you mean in how it applies to women in a slightly different way. I think that, in our modern world, social media does also have a massive part to play. I was actually listening to a recent interview about this subject – on Trevor Noah’s podcast, which I’m a bit obsessed with – about how women, how girls online are predominantly on Instagram, and I think that makes them even more hyperaware of how they appear to different people because it is so image-based. I think the majority of younger girls are using social media to post pictures of themselves, or look at pictures of other people and how much fun they’re having and how great they look and stuff like that, and it makes women a lot more conscious about themselves and how we appear to the outside world. I think teenage boys are more using the internet for things like video gaming, and they use it…in a way that doesn’t put them out there more vulnerably to the world. I was born in ‘96…so it’s interesting, these stories of coming of age and childhood and the access we have to the whole world has really carved and molded our whole lives as women. It’s fascinating, and I think it’s something we’ve not totally got to grips with, but I think it’s something I want to explore a bit more in my work.

I think about the same thing a lot…I remember being pretty young when Instagram became a thing, when social media started really planting its roots in our society and it became so widely acceptable for kids and teens to start posting their life on there. You have this point of view where you can see everybody else’s life on the grid, but you can also see yours and the image of yourself that you’re trying to present to people. And this can apply to men, in the sense that there are male influencers – they tend to be fitness influencers, or streamers, or, like misogynists. But for women, it’s a lot more of an industry: being an influencer and living this aspirational life and not having a 9-to-5 is a job now, and it’s a job to curate your life and your body and your image to fulfill a certain aspiration for women. Doesn’t that break your heart? Imagine if you were twelve or thirteen right now and ingesting that stuff.

It is so interesting! I think about it a lot, and it does break my heart. I write about it in another Substack, which was one on childhood, and I think the influence that smartphones and screens are having on peoples’ childhoods are actually monumental. It’s really harmful. I remember the birth of touchscreens being commonplace, so I never grew up with a touchscreen, I grew up with a TV with five channels. I used to go out and play with friends in the park, and it was totally normal. Now, you don’t see as much of that because kids are very trapped in their little bubbles, they’re conscripted to their screens. I walked past a park the other day, and I saw a lot of kids all sitting on their phones on a playground…it’s strange, because they’re all probably flicking through TikTok or something, and we’re all searching naturally as humans for connection, but we are denying ourselves of real face-to-face connection. I’ve got a bit on my soapbox about this, but it’s something I really care about…I work with kids in my day job, I teach, and helping kids to have fun without screens. I don’t know if you have it in the US, but in the UK, there’s an organization called A [Smartphone] Free-Childhood…it helps parents bring up their children without screens. It’s an idea that I have for one of my next short films, screen addiction in children, and that married with an underappreciation for the natural world.

I think that’s an incredible thing to write about, and clearly you have very formed opinions on this – I never have a problem with a soapbox. It really struck me when you were talking, being a writer myself, I very firmly believe that the heart of being a writer is human connection, having community, understanding the authentic human spirit. In one woman’s opinion, writing cannot be genuine and authentic unless you know how to be with people and connect with people…you really have to surround yourself with and learn from real people. We don’t have to get into all the ways that the genuine written word is threatened right now, but it strikes me that the kind of world kids are brought up in now could really have implications for what genuine creative writing looks like in the future.

Completely. The big elephant in the room is AI, of course…it’s a massive threat, and I think it’s something I sort of dodged talking about for a while. I’m a real advocate for inspiring creativity in kids, I think it gives them an outlet in which to express themselves, whereas they’re very often taught to be passive and take things in instead of expressing themselves. I think humans are natural storytellers – when you go down the pub and you have a pint, usually someone is going to launch into a story of something that happened recently…I think there will always be stories. And I think what AI can’t replicate is the true, lived experience of being a human…I heard this on the ScriptNotes podcast, but AI can’t have a traumatic childhood. You shouldn’t have to have a traumatic childhood to be a good writer, I don’t believe that, but we’ve all gone through traumatic things as humans. That’s just the nature of being a human being, you can’t have rainbows and butterflies all the time. We come against a lot of challenges in our lives, and that is fuel for writing. And I totally agree with what you’re saying…the most spellbinding, authentic writing comes from people’s own lives. I like to come at it from a more optimistic point of view…don’t give up, basically! We need to carry on writing stories.

I agree…I think, on the individual level, we can at least learn that authenticity and where it comes from really does matter in writing. That leads into my next question: where did this all start for you? How did you start writing yourself?

I started writing when I was a teenager, just little angsty poems…I always had a background in community theatre, so I was acting in plays in my local theatre since the age of fourteen. So it naturally evolved into writing scripts, and I’ve just stuck with it ever since, really. Writing, for me, is my most rewarding form of expression. I love performing so much, but creating original work – nothing beats that. It allows me to really understand myself and the world around me so much better, and I think that’s just what living is, isn’t it? Narrative dramas in particular have had such an impact on how I see the world, and I think it can actually move people…and things to change, even if that’s slowly. As a teenager, becoming more starkly aware of my place as a woman in the world and the place of women in the world turned me on to writing more gender-specific work.

I was a performer in middle school and high school too…I remember being twelve, thirteen – like we talked about, that time where you start realizing who you are to the rest of the world, and what the rest of the world might value in you – and I remember realizing that I wasn’t getting cast in certain roles I wanted because I wasn’t conventionally pretty enough, or because I didn’t have the look or the exact voice of the ingénue. Even if you know you shouldn’t take it personally, I think it’s impossible to not take it personally! It really impacts the way you see yourself. Do you think that that led to you wanting to take the reins yourself and write your own stories?

Yes, I do. I think, also, being an actor – as much as I love acting, love performing – acting is an interpretive job; you’re interpreting someone else’s work and delivering it. And there are ways you can be creative within that, but in terms of actually using that creative muscle, it’s quite limiting. For me, I just have this itch to create myself, this itch I can’t stop scratching…I write every day now. But to your point of being cast and people pigeonholing you, I suppose, that has bugged me a lot in my life. You don’t have as much agency as an actor, you don’t have that autonomy that writing gives you: you’re told by someone else that yes, you can play this role…and that feels very prescribed. That can be frustrating, because acting is a personal thing; often, your performance comes from yourself…I think you do have to have a strong backbone for that. You’re the one thrust out there on the stage, and on the screen, and people are typically and historically very critical of actors. I’m just saying, give them a break, it’s hard! 

I wanted to know more about your experience at university. It’s obviously such a formative time in life, when you get to explore your independence and pick what you want to do at that time in your life. I always feel like a stalker doing research for interviews, but I know you went to the University of East Anglia…how was that?

I decided at the age of eighteen that I wanted to write, even though I’d done so much acting. I was auditioning for drama schools…and then I got into UEA, and it just felt right. I wanted to write…university isn’t the easiest time. I think it can be very confronting – obviously, you’re living away from family for the first time. But what is amazing about it…you’re surrounded by so many people and so many facilities. And it’s a great testing ground for your work, it’s a chance for you to fuck up a bit and make mistakes – you’re not being judged by the outer world just yet, you’re just understanding what you want to write about and who you want to work with. I made a lot of mistakes at uni! And I got back up again, and that’s what it’s all about. I think I’m way better off for having had that experience. At the end of it, I wrote my first play I was really happy with, Trade…if anything, I wish I’d used the facilities and everything even more. But, you know, you do spend a lot of time down the bar, or down dancing in the student club with the terrible sticky floors.

Well, that’s part of the experience. I think the period after graduating school is not so often talked about, but I remember graduating and feeling like the floor fell out from under me…I was so used to writing for four years in a row, and I wasn’t prepared for the shift. Was that your experience at all after finishing?

Oh my gosh, yes. I massively relate to that. I got a job in a theater doing marketing for a while, and that’s technically writing, writing social media posts, writing press releases…but it’s not the writing that makes our hearts sing. I felt like the oxygen tank had been turned off on my writing because I was working a 9-to-5. I think, even though it’s frustrating, the starvation makes you realize that [you] miss it. So I quit my 9-to-5 and I’ve managed to make writing work for me. While the university I went to was a great experience, there wasn’t the greatest career progression staff…I think that’s a criticism across the board of writing degrees, it’s hard to know how to get your foot in the door…so that’s why I predominantly self-produce now. I know what I want to write, I want to get work made, so I just make it happen myself. Just stop waiting for permission, just do it, that’s what I believe. 

So what’s going on with you right now? You just finished a play – what’s next for you?

My next short film – I’ve written it, the script is ready to go. I’ve got quite a bit of backing, it was shortlisted for the Kino Film Fund…we really want to make it this year or early next year. It’s just funding! We’re just waiting for it to get greenlit, we’re about to start crowdfunding for that. The short film explores a day in the life of someone experiencing period poverty in the UK, which is a massive issue here, people not getting adequate access to necessities like period products. But it has moments of light and humor, it’s very much about an unexpected relationship that she forms with a man. I’ve got two other short scripts that I’m hoping to get made next year, and I want to turn Back of the Net into a feature. I’m also working on a feature exploring my Serbian heritage, which is sort of semi-autobiographical.