After her engagement ended in April 2025, comedian Elf Lyons found herself repeatedly watching Apollo 13, the 1995 Ron Howard film about three astronauts trapped in a damaged spacecraft. For Lyons, the film became a source of comfort, helping her see that sometimes the mere act of getting home is the success.
A family motto and a film about successful failure
Lyons explains that “Failure is not an option” has always been her family’s catchphrase, taken from flight director Gene Kranz’s famous line in the film. She says it isn’t about being the best, but about refusing to stop being.
Having loved Apollo 13 since childhood, Lyons describes it as the perfect film to watch when you feel you might implode, because the astronauts got home. It is a film about a successful failure. When the Nasa director warns, “This could be the worst disaster Nasa’s ever experienced,” Kranz replies, “I believe this is going to be our finest hour.” Lyons says she starts crying every time she watches that scene.
Since she was little, Lyons has used scientific examples and historical events as analogies to explain her emotional state. For this reason, she was never fascinated by the trapped astronauts led by Tom Hanks’s Jim Lovell, but by the white-shirted, spectacled, chain-smoking engineers and scientists in Mission Control.
Mission Control as a model for survival
She admired Ed Harris’s crew-cut character saying, “Let’s work the problem, people. Let’s not make things worse by guessing,” and Gary Sinise as Ken Mattingly refusing to take a break: “If they don’t get one, I don’t get one!”
Mission Control embodied everything Lyons loved about humanity and learning: teamwork, creativity, rationality, calmness and respect for the data and facts. This was why, in 2025, when her own systems module exploded, Apollo 13 became her breakup movie. On a balmy night in Australia in April 2025, her relationship with her fiancé ended in a concrete hotel room under a flightpath in Sydney, 15 minutes before she was due to perform to 2,000 people.
Instantly, her brain shut down and went into survival mode. She moved into her own dreamlike Lunar Module, working flat out but on reduced power. In 2025, that meant touring Australia and the UK with a show in which she pretended to be a horse, while also relearning three shows for the Edinburgh fringe.
Survival through action and support
People suggested tragic weepies like Call Me By Your Name, Twilight, and Blue Valentine, telling her to “let it out.” But Lyons declined, saying she had to be a horse later. She wanted a film with no chance of people having sex at all. She explains that life isn’t romantic declarations; it is actions that matter. Survival, she says, is Ed Harris declaring, “We are not losing the crew!”
The immediate explosion passed, but survival mode lasted much longer. The astronauts survive because they trust Mission Control. During the second half of 2025, Mission Control became every WhatsApp group on her phone. Her friends and family made sure she ate, drove her to every show. Her sister let her borrow and subsequently lose most of her clothes. Her brother told her he loved her more than he had in his entire life. Everyone lied about her new haircut. They kept her on the right trajectory, found the duct tape and rebuilt her lifeboat while she concentrated on putting one hoof in front of the other.
Whenever she felt she couldn’t keep going, Lyons returned to the film, revelling in the knowledge that it was based on truth. If Mission Control could get three men home from the other side of the moon, she could rebuild her confidence, travel the world as a horse and prepare for the Edinburgh fringe.
Now, when people ask how she is, Lyons tells them she’s like the crew of Apollo 13. She’s home. She had a rupture, but she landed – and, like Mission Control, she is focusing on the next mission. Because failure is not an option. Elf Lyons Is the Woman on the Edge is at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, to 31 August.
