Ellie Kildunne: I was just a girl with a passion, a belief and a raw talent

Optimistic eyes and a Hollywood smile pierce a thicket of bleached blonde curls you imagine takes hours to look as spontaneously chaotic yet chic as it does. Kildunne has an essential charm born only of true confidence, of the belief that of course everyone is going to like you, because you’re great. The reigning World Rugby Women’s Player of the Year at 25, the Harlequins full-back has scored 40 tries across 53 England caps, losing just two of those matches. The Olympic rings tattooed on her forearm recall her time at Paris 2024. She is the darling of a home World Cup England are runaway favourites to win, perhaps the most exhilarating viewing prospect in rugby. She runs like she can stop and start time at will.

Kildunne grew up on a farm in Riddlesden, a chocolate-box village on the eastern edge of Keighley, West Yorkshire. Alongside two boys and girls from neighbouring farms, she describes something of a Swallows and Amazons childhood, climbing trees and building chicken pens, all while head to toe in Liverpool kit. Before she became “the only girl in Yorkshire playing rugby”, she always wanted to be a footballer. But when the boys she played football with started rugby training, she didn’t want to be left out. So after a rugby league taster session at Keighley Albion aged six, she then tried union. Until she was 13, she played for boys’ teams. Other teams only thought it was odd until she side-stepped them.

“I loved my upbringing, it was very outdoorsy,” she says in a whitewashed east London loft, which now feels like a spiritual home for someone who plans to travel light throughout the World Cup and buy most of their outfits from local thrift shops. “The thing that I really remember is the freedom that I was given to really explore who I am as a person, just enjoy life for what it was. It was very much just go and have fun, just go and be a child.”

You gradually realise Kildunne views everything through the lens of either furthering her own self-understanding or self-expression. Her main hobbies are photography and fashion – exploring how she sees the world, and how it sees her. Rugby is just another vessel through which to make sense of herself, to become what she always believed she should be. It’s not everything, except for when it is.

She calls England boss John Mitchell “her most inspiring coach” because of “his openness to allow authenticity both on and off the field”. He creates “a space where you don’t have to really align with anything, that you can explore where you want to go and find the solutions within that,” she says.

This particularly matters because Kildunne’s game is so obviously dependent on creativity and freedom, with the physical gifts to dance past anyone and the inspiration to do it. She has “always been an instinctive player”, although also mentions the “probably unseen” hours of analysis which provide the necessary information to act on instinct. And yet there are stories which create a sort of mythos around her talent. Performing well for Gloucester-Hartpury at 18, she was disappointed to be told she wasn’t being called up for England Under-20s. The same afternoon she was selected for the senior squad as a full-back, despite never really playing there. Four years later she started a World Cup final at No 15. Seven years later, she’s the best player in any position.

She feigns modesty, but she’s not particularly good at it, and while she won’t lean into intimations at a genius of divine inspiration, she doesn’t exactly reject them either. She talks about herself in the third person as only someone who spends hours pondering their status as an inevitable role model would. “I think it’s easy to be seen as open when people can watch and read about who they think Ellie Kildunne is, but Ellie Kildunne wasn’t always a rugby player, Ellie Kildunne was a girl with a passion, a belief and a raw talent to run around a rugby pitch, and that’s the person that you can always go back to.” If she possesses any sense of stereotypical English self-deprecation, she hides it well.

But then how modest should the best player in the world be? There is an extent to which greatness requires a confidence trick of the self, to convince yourself that you are not only different to the eight billion, but better, and deserving of being so. Her favourite quote, which her mother pinned to her bedroom wall, is from Roald Dahl’s My Uncle Oswald: “Lukewarm is no good.”

An ambassador for clothing company Canterbury, as well as Asahi, hers was the obvious face of this World Cup. Between the instantly recognisable hair and her cowboy celebration, she has a pre-made personal brand. And to a certain extent, the Red Roses brand relies on Ellie Kildunne, built off her innate marketability.

While she doesn’t quite take Ilona Maher’s stance on social media openness, Kildunne talks about the “beauty of being understood” by the wider public. “To be understood is to have people around you who care about you, not the person you play with a rugby shirt on,” she says. “The power of being understood has really allowed me to be unapologetically myself. It’s made me have trust in myself that I’m on the path that I need to be on, and everything happens for a reason.”

Alongside a podcast she shares with Red Roses winger Jess Breach, Rugby Rodeo, Kildunne has a dedicated Instagram account for her photography, and often slips around events unrecognised. She bought a new camera for the World Cup, taking pictures behind the scenes from blowout warm-up wins over Spain and France.

“I like capturing moments that are missed. It might be a gust in someone’s eye, a smile between two people, a memory,” she says.

“With everything in life I don’t think you should just take inspiration from one person, if you can take elements of the people that you meet and see, whether that be on social media or the Tube back from Shoreditch.

“Everyone’s got their own style and own way of expressing themselves, and if I was to try and mimic someone else, I’d just be expressing them. When you walk into a room and you’re confident in what you’re wearing, you own the room, you show your values and who you are as a person and then people are attracted to your aura.”

And people do instinctively flock to Kildunne, who is developing the gravitational pull of superstardom. At a base level, it’s fun to be around someone so clearly on the cusp of something, so fizzing with possibility. She won’t be drawn on the future, but only hopes it is beyond even her wildest imagination. Unsurprisingly, the prospect of women’s rugby, and her own fame, snowballing beyond her control does not scare her. Here, stretching the boundaries of physics and her sport, is where she always believed she was supposed to be.

Photograph by Charlie Forgham-Bailey / The Observer