Scene-stealing
With
Eve Hewson
Bad Sisters fans will already be familiar with EVE HEWSON’s flair for dark comedy, and now she’s starring alongside Nicole Kidman in summer’s hottest murder mystery, The Perfect Couple. Add to that a role in Noah Baumbach’s as-yet-untitled movie with the likes of George Clooney, Greta Gerwig and Adam Sandler, and it’s fair to say she’s grabbing Hollywood’s attention. PANDORA SYKES meets the actor to talk female friendships, axe-throwing with her A-list castmates, and swapping life in Dublin for LA
Eve Hewson is a people person. “I’m obsessed with her,” she beams of Isla Fisher. “Australian and Irish girls should not hang out together – there’s a reason why our countries are so far apart.” Working with Nicole Kidman was like “sunshine and rainbows”. Dakota Fanning: “My bestie,” Hewson notes crunchily, through a mouthful of crab croquettes.
Despite a savage bout of transatlantic jet lag, the Irish actor is on flying form, thanks in part to her riotous slate of upcoming projects. This includes Noah Baumbach’s highly anticipated, shrouded-in-mystery and currently unnamed movie for Netflix, which is scheduled to come out next year. The eye-wateringly starry cast includes Fisher, Greta Gerwig, George Clooney, Billy Cruddup and Adam Sandler. What’s the plot? No idea, Hewson says. “I haven’t read the script. [Baumbach] only gave us our scenes. It’s actually kind of cool… The characters sort of live in their own world.” She grapples with what she knows and what she can say. “They all relate to George Clooney,” she settles on finally. “But no one really sees each other.” Color me intrigued. “Me too!” she laughs.
“[Filming The Perfect Couple] was a BLAST; like being at SUMMER CAMP. You don’t usually have so many people on set your own AGE”
She can, however, talk about The Perfect Couple, a deliciously bitchy and bingeable Netflix whodunnit based on the best-selling thriller by Elin Hilderbrand, and directed by Susanne Bier. Hewson stars as Amelia, a free-spirited bride-to-be, marrying into a wealthy and uptight family. The night before the wedding, a dead body is found on the beach.
Filming it was “a blast”, says the 33-year-old. “[It was] like being at summer camp. You don’t usually have so many people on set your own age.” The show’s matriarch is played by an ever-immaculate Nicole Kidman, whose production company, Blossom Films, co-produced the series, and who was “very maternal” and “knew everyone’s schedules off by heart”.
The Perfect Couple was shot in Cape Cod “in the off-season, which meant that nothing was open. You have to drive 20 minutes just to get to a Starbucks.” At the weekends, Hewson and her castmates (who also included Dakota Fanning, Meghann Fahy, Liev Schreiber and Billy Howle) would go axe-throwing. “Halfway through [the shoot], everyone started twitching [because] we needed to get out of Cape Cod. We knew each other too well by this point,” she says, laughing. “So, the axe-throwing was very therapeutic.”
For the final weeks of filming The Perfect Couple, Hewson was also shooting season two of Bad Sisters, Sharon Horgan’s dark comedy-drama for Apple TV – the overlap caused by the SAG-AFTRA strike delaying filming on the former. One was filming in Dublin, Ireland, and the other on the East Coast, USA. There’s only one way for that to work: “You don’t sleep,” she deadpans.
At one point, Netflix had to build a fake Cape Cod in London, because they couldn’t get her back from the Bad Sisters set in time. Hewson knew which character she was playing based on the hue of her skin. “When I was pale, I was Becka [in Bad Sisters].” And when she was tanned, she was in The Perfect Couple. “At the start [of filming], I was like, ‘What the fuck is going on? We are so orange!’ And by the end I was like, ‘I’m never going to go back. This is who I am now’,” she says, solemnly. “I am a fake-tan girl.”
“[Bad Sisters season two] is BRILLIANT. A lot of people wondered HOW [Sharon Horgan] would do [another series]. And I was like, why are you questioning her SKILL?”
The central plot of Bad Sisters was that a vile brother-in-law must be offed. Season one spoiler upcoming… With Claes Bang’s character John Paul definitively dead, who is on the hit list for season two? Hewson is zip-lipped (again), “but it’s brilliant,” she says – even better than the first season. “A lot of people wondered how [Sharon Horgan] would do [another series]. And I was like, ‘Didn’t The Sopranos do it? Didn’t Breaking Bad do it? Why are you questioning her skill? Her skill is off the charts!” Hewson adores working with Horgan. “Everything she does turns to gold.”
The cast of Bad Sisters – which includes Horgan and Anne-Marie Duff – are now “so bonded… we need two or three hours of chat before we start [shooting]. They’re like, ‘We’re rolling, rolling’, and we’re all, ‘Just give us a minute! So, he said…’”. And the WhatsApp chat for Bad Sisters is considerably filthier than her other movie chats. “There are boys in The Perfect Couple [chat]. We don’t want to scare those little boys away! God bless ’em.”
The second of four children born to U2’s Paul Hewson, aka Bono, and businesswoman and activist Ali Hewson, Memphis Eve Sunny Day Iris Hewson (only her best friend calls her Memphis) grew up in Dublin in a creative household “filled with conversations about film and music and poetry and literature”. As a child, she played the piano and the drums and, while acting felt inevitable – “it was the only thing I was any good at” – she originally wanted to be a pop star. “I thought I was going to be Charli XCX.”
Aged 18, she moved to New York City to study drama at NYU Tisch Institute of Performing Arts, before landing her first major part a year later in This Must Be the Place. Since then, she’s played various roles, including the movie adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, strange thriller Behind Her Eyes, and last year’s charming (and underrated) indie flick, Flora and Son, where Hewson plays a single mother to a teenage boy. And then, of course, Bad Sisters came knocking.
After years of nomadic living, accompanied by her cat, Luna (“Is my [love for my] cat a beige flag or a red flag?”) she has recently settled in LA. “I never thought I would move there and then I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, lying in the sun is a good thing for my brain’.” She decompresses with lashings of reality TV (she just completed all 11 seasons of Vanderpump Rules) and blames Dakota Fanning, she notes drily, “for turning me into a Bravo Queen”.
During the pandemic, Hewson and her siblings all moved back in with their parents in Dublin – it was the first time they’d lived together in years. “We have a studio at the end of [my parents’] garden, where [we’d] usually end up, in the middle of the night, writing stupid songs. I actually got kicked out of the family band for being too enthusiastic. One evening, I noticed they were all in the studio together. I came in, I grabbed a bass, I started slapping the bass. And they said, ‘You gotta go. This isn’t our vibe’.” Bono didn’t make the band though: “No! He was asleep by 10pm every night.”
On the subject of her very famous father, Hewson is sanguine: “The only thing you can do is crack a joke and move on.” Fortunately, she is very good at those, once tweeting: “2023 goals: be successful enough to get recognized as a nepo baby”. She has the timing and deadpan execution of a comedian. “I actually have incredible taste – I just choose to wear this,” she says, waving a hand over her sweat pants.
“[Dakota Fanning] is PRIM and proper in her interviews, but in REAL life she’s filthy. I wouldn’t be FRIENDS with her if she wasn’t”
Hewson loves fashion, “but I like to feel like ‘me’,” she says. Her stylist is Karla Welch, who also dresses Justin Bieber and Tracee Ellis Ross, and who “dresses me a little bit more like a pop star than an actress”. Hewson’s a huge fan of “Loewe, obviously,” and The Frankie Shop, “for that sexy tomboy look”. “Dakota [Fanning] got me into The Row,” she groans. (“She’s prim and proper in her interviews, but in real life she’s filthy,” she says of Fanning. “I wouldn’t be friends with her if she wasn’t.”) Not only does Hewson favor tomboy style, “I wanna play the boys,” she adds. When they cast the upcoming Beatles movie, “I was so mad. I was like, I want to play John Lennon!”
“What has CHANGED [in Hollywood] is that you’re allowed to now say that you had a BAD experience… It gives us POWER”
Being young and female in Hollywood has improved in the past few years, she reflects – but only sort of. Has she been treated in an inappropriate way? “Absolutely.” Is that still common? “Yep.” She pauses. “What has changed is that you’re allowed to now say that you had a bad experience. Before it was, ‘Be grateful, don’t complain, this is what it’s like if you want to be a star.’ At least now, even if people want to or not, they kind of have to respond, or they get cancelled. It gives us power.”
Hewson, you sense, is actively locating that power. She’s keen to experience every aspect of the industry and wants to do a “big kids’ fantasy movie, with huge wigs and huge costumes,” and to do a show on Broadway, and to produce, direct and write. It’s heady to be around someone in such an abundance mindset, who wants to grab everything she can, even if it means filming two projects at the same time. After a year of back-to-back filming, there are no vacation days for Hewson. Instead, there’s another mysterious, unnamed movie to start filming – and more castmates to go axe-throwing with.
The Perfect Couple is out on Netflix on September 5. Bad Sisters season two returns to Apple TV+ in November
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