A couple of months ago, Keeley Hawes was in the Wolseley on London’s Piccadilly, about to have lunch, when she saw a familiar face across the room. She was meeting her husband, the actor Matthew Macfadyen. “I went, ‘My God, it’s Amber Rudd,’” she whispers. In the television juggernaut that was BBC One’s Bodyguard, Hawes was Julia Montague, the ill-fated home secretary who took no nonsense, though she took a shine to her security detail, played by Richard Madden. She had researched Rudd for the role, and the similarities did not go unnoticed. But the pair were yet to meet.
Rudd had been complimentary about Hawes’s take on a frontline politician. “She’d been brilliant about all that. But it’s still extraordinary when this person who was home secretary walks over and goes, ‘Keeley!’” Hawes does an impression of a rabbit-in-the-headlights smile. Also in the room was the French film star Leslie Caron, with whom Hawes had worked on The Durrells. “So it was this anxiety dream,” she laughs. “I was going, ‘This is just really weird. Quite odd. Very strange.’”
In person, there is something slightly head girl-ish about Hawes, which surely helped her pull off that Bodyguard role with such authority. She is impeccably polite, and dutifully points out when things are lovely and lucky and brilliant and glorious. But, as anyone who saw her as beleaguered Lindsay Denton in Line of Duty will have noted, she has a certain robustness, and she’s quick and funny; I’d bet good money that she’s a proper laugh when she’s off-duty. She doesn’t normally drink during interviews, she says, nor does she normally drink in the middle of the afternoon. “But I would like a glass of champagne,” she decides, as we sit down in the bar of a Knightsbridge hotel. “Have one. It’s only small, look.”
The funny thing about Hawes is that she keeps having “years”. In 2014, there was Line of Duty. It was her year in 2016, too, when a second season of Line of Duty, as well as The Hollow Crown, the terrifying BBC One thriller The Missing and then also The Durrells made her a ubiquitous on-screen presence.
Then, of course, last year she had Bodyguard and Mrs Wilson, though she shot much more than that, which means 2019 may well be her year, too. In fact, Hawes has been so busy that she isn’t quite sure what we’re here to discuss. It’s actually Traitors, a new Channel 4 drama about international spy rings just after the second world war. “Right,” she says, settling in. “Very good, very good.”
In Traitors, she plays Priscilla Garrick, a severe civil servant, and when she first appears on screen I took a second to realise it was her. “Some photographs came out the other day from it, and I read that it was a new look for me, that they’d aged me up,” she chuckles. “They didn’t. There is no ageing makeup at all. It’s just my face. It’s just me, with only foundation on.” She can’t talk about it much – “like Bodyguard, you don’t want to give anything away” – but she was delighted to be part of a series that’s centred around a young woman, played by Emma Appleton, and is written, created and directed by women, too. “And I’m in it,” she says. As a woman? She smiles. “As an aged woman.” She’s 43.
Traitors is another one of those dramas that oozes “quality”: good actors, a decent budget and a fabulous costume department. Hawes can see that television is having a moment, and for someone who made their career on the small screen, it must be satisfying to see it enjoying such acclaim.
“I’m really pleased I’ve stuck with it all this time. I didn’t cheat on it too much with film, and I feel very smug about that,” she says. “There have been periods where TV has felt unfashionable, but if somebody had said, 10 years ago, that Meryl Streep is doing a series, Robert De Niro is doing a series, you’d be going, ‘What planet are you on?’ It’s really exciting.”
Bodyguard was the most-watched drama on British television since records began in 2002, and it is currently making waves on Netflix in the US. But when Richard Madden won a Golden Globe for best actor in January, it was reported that Hawes had “snubbed” the ceremony.
“Ooh look at me, snubbing the Golden Globes,” she posted on Twitter, with a picture of her trailer. “I was in Slough,” she explains. She is shooting Misbehaviour there, with Keira Knightley and Rhys Ifans, a film about the feminist protests against Miss World in 1970. She was invited to the ceremony, but she was needed on set and it was impossible to move her day. “So I said, absolutely fine, and on we went, and then suddenly I was a big snubber!” She snorts with laughter. “As if the Golden Globes give a shit that I snubbed them. It’s just ridiculous.”
She is at pains to point out that even though she’s speaking out about false stories, she has no desire to start a fight. “But,” she sighs, “you don’t have a lot of control. I have no idea what you’re going to write, but that’s part of the deal. You take a deep breath and you get a thick skin and you say fine. But, actually, when people are totally fabricating things about you, your weight, making people think you did something that you didn’t, you do have a tiny bit of power, where you can say, no I didn’t. Then it’s quite useful.”
She’s referring to another story which reported that, in order to prepare for her Bodyguard sex scenes, she’d lost a stone on an alkaline diet. “Um, no, I didn’t,” she tweeted, adding the hashtag #whatthefuckisanalkalinediet? Did she ever find out what it was? “Erm, no. I don’t know what an alkaline diet is. And I certainly didn’t do it because I had sex scenes with a man 10 years younger than me.”
Hawes grew up in a council flat in Marylebone, not too far from where we’re sitting today, though long before the area was gentrified. “It was a brilliant childhood. Sort of unimaginable now.” How so? “Just the idea of your children going out and playing out and coming in when it’s dark, that just doesn’t happen. The idea of doing it in central London seems even more heightened and scary. But no, it was fantastic. It makes you quite bold, growing up. It makes you not afraid of anything. I loved it.”
She enjoyed acting at primary school, “as any eight- or nine-year-old might”, and went on to the Sylvia Young drama school. “But it was a very different time. There had been no X Factor. There wasn’t anyone there who had become terribly successful. We were just a bunch of kids having the best time, and doing this thing that we really enjoyed.”
She wasn’t there to turn it into a profession, or a career. “It wasn’t a sort of burning ambition to be on TV,” she says. “I just liked acting. And it’s a really healthy thing. You’re singing away and doing things that give you confidence.”
One of her contemporaries was Emma Bunton and the pair went on caravanning holidays. “I can confirm that caravanning took place. Again, it was a long time ago. People didn’t go on big glamorous holidays then, certainly coming from my background, and her background, and lots of people’s.” She did go to Corfu, though, when she’d just read My Family and Other Animals, which made her love the place from an early age. “Everything about it is brilliant.”
Just to go back to the caravanning… “You’re obsessed with the caravanning,” she says, chuckling. “I’d quite like to go caravanning with her again. The awful part about this is that she looks exactly the same as she did when we went caravanning. Just gorgeous.” It was, she adds, a static caravan. “No, we didn’t take it with us.”
After being spotted by a scout, Hawes did some modelling, and was the go-to girl for Britpop videos, from Pulp’s Common People to Suede’s Saturday Night, for which she has the IMDB credit “woman eating chips”. She’d done the odd TV job as a child, but started to work steadily after appearing in Dennis Potter’s Karaoke.
But two roles established her properly and firmly. She was the male impersonator Kitty Butler in the 2002 adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet. She still gets letters about it from women, even now, and it turned her into a dykon. “A dykon! Ooh, I like that, yeah. I’ll take that.” The same year, Spooks arrived, and in many ways the spy thriller set a template for the cinematic television we still see today. It was where she met Macfadyen, whom she went on to marry, two years later. “Spooks will always stand out. We all had such fun on that, all of us. And I met my husband.”
Hawes has three children: a son from her first marriage, whom she had when she was 24, and a son and a daughter with Macfadyen. “I was done at 30,” she says. “In my line of work that’s unusual, but now my friends are having children, I’m like, mwah ha ha, mine are all gone.” She and Macfadyen take it in turns to go off to work, and he’s up next, on the second series of Succession. “I’m just at home, with the kids. Making cookies, probably.”
In 2014 Hawes joined the second series of Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty as the maybe-corrupt cop Lindsay Denton. It was a pivotal role for her, and showed how good she was at rough, tough and wily. She didn’t take it with the intention of it becoming a gamechanger. “Like Bodyguard, we just all turned up and did our jobs the best we could. Nobody can foresee something like that, or something like the reaction to Lindsay Denton. It just sort of lit the touch paper with people.”
Denton’s did-she-didn’t-she plight became front-page news, which was, in a way, a dress rehearsal for the Bodyguard furore. “I was going to say it was certainly a dress rehearsal for lying with Jed, but I didn’t lie this time [with Bodyguard]. I was very upfront, and everybody just thought we were bluffing and bluffing. It just seemed to add fuel to it, the more we said, ‘No, she’s really gone.”’ She sips her drink. “Great fun.” She says that even now, most days she’s asked if Julia Montague is really dead. “Someone said it to me this morning. Total denial.” Or are you bluffing now? “Maybe!”
After four series, The Durrells is coming to an end this year. Hawes also has Traitors, and the new Stephen Poliakoff series, Summer of Rockets, and then there’s Misbehaviour. She says she’s always been drawn to hard work. “And as we said, TV has upped the ante and got really exciting. After all these years, I feel I have got something to bring in terms of producing, or sheer experience, really.” Hawes executive produced the final series of The Durrells, and that side of the business is something she would like to explore more. “I like making things happen. And it’s exciting to get to 43 and think, ‘Ooh, I can do something else,’ as well. It keeps it interesting.”
I ask her if she’s seen the Amy Schumer sketch, in which actors over the age of 40, including Tina Fey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, get together to celebrate their “last fuckable day”. “Before they have to go on an alkaline diet?” she shoots back. She hasn’t, but thinks the idea that women are less employable once they get to a certain age is losing its power. “You only need to look at the TV that’s coming up. It’s full of amazing women, of writing for women.” She is noticing more and more women on sets, doing the sorts of technical jobs in particular that were traditionally handed down from father to son. “People aren’t often very positive, because we need more of it, of course, but it is happening. You need to let people know the opportunity is there.”
Hawes seems to strive for the most positive take on everything. “God yeah, I really do. I think we are very good in this country at going the other way.” She has spoken before about experiencing periods of depression since her teens. “It’s part of it, isn’t it? You can get yourself very upset about things, and positive thinking is a very powerful thing, I’ve found.” That, and champagne? “And champagne,” she agrees.
Traitors premieres on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm
Hair by Ken O’Rourke at Premier Hair and Makeup using Charles Worthington; makeup by Emma Kotch using Sisley Skin Care and Cosmetics; digital operator Sam Ford; photo assistant Tom Frimley; fashion assistant Penny Chan; with thanks to the Connaught Hotel, the-connaught.co.uk
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