Stephen Arnell

Anyone for tennis – on film?

What (else) to watch during Wimbledon

  • From Spectator Life
(Colin Bell/Universal Studios)

With Wimbledon fortnight upon us, what better time to explore tennis on the silver screen? Even more fortuitous is that Aidan Turner’s raunchy Amazon Prime series Fifteen Love will debut this summer, in which the Poldark star plays a tennis coach with a chequered past. Turner also features as moustachioed TV presenter Declan O’Hara (shades of Des Lynam as was) in Disney+’s upcoming adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, a show apparently so steamy it needed two intimacy coaches.


As an aspirational, largely middle-class game, tennis when depicted in the movies is largely free of the pile-ons, punch-ups and bad language of films about football, rugby and other contact sports. But, not as you’ll find out, wholly so…

Match Point (2005) – Disney+


As with his later Cassandra’s Dream (2007), Woody Allen demonstrates a tin ear for English as spoken in its native country in Match Point. However, the movie does have its compensations – it looks good, and the cast is generally first-rate (including Emily Mortimer, Brian Cox, and Matthew Goode), although leads Jonathan Rhys Meyers (as scheming married tennis coach Chris) and Scarlett Johansson (his mistress Nola) are a tad on the wooden side.

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