Keeley interview: A former Spook no longer haunted by the past (Dec 2006)
Keeley Hawes, the star of Spooks, Tipping the Velvet and, in posh voiceover only, the Lara Croft computer games, is full of surprises. When we meet for breakfast, she starts telling me how she was up at 4am to feed her son. As I have read about only the one son, Myles, I conjure up a Little Britain-style picture of the six-year-old guzzling greedily at her breast.
Tall and, so far as I can tell beneath her grey top, slim, with clear green eyes, impeccable skin and blonde hair darkening fashionably at the roots, Hawes certainly doesn’t look like a harassed new mum. Yet, it transpires, in September she gave birth to a whopping new baby by the name of Ralph.
“He is 10lb 8oz, nearly as big as you,” she says giggling with mock horror. “He came out and everyone went ‘Oooh!’ and I thought three heads or something, but he was just enormous. He doesn’t look like either of us. He looks like Jeff from Curb Your Enthusiasm, you know, the fat agent.”
It was, despite everything, a reasonably easy delivery and — since most of her neat bump had contained simply Ralph — within a few days her tummy was back to trim. But it is not so much her weight as the absence of baby blues that makes Ralph’s arrival hard to credit. She laughs so much in our hour together at Hazlitt’s Hotel in Soho that I think she must have post-natal euphoria.
Ralph is her third child, the second by her second husband Matthew Macfadyen who, like her, became well-known through playing a spy on the BBC’s Spooks. Last year he leapt into true fame as Mr Darcy, playing opposite Keira Knightley, in Pride and Prejudice. She is clearly very much in love with him. After I leave, she apparently talks non-stop about Matthew to our photographer. But, then, after some dark times — which we can hardly avoid discussing — she seems in love with her whole life at the moment.
There is, however, a pleasing irreverence, even a cynicism to what might otherwise sound like gush. Although on Boxing Day she is in After Thomas, an affecting ITV tear-jerker about an autistic child saved by his relationship with a pet dog, she doesn’t get at all misty-eyed talking about it. She plays the mother and began filming when eight weeks pregnant. Did it not fill her with worries about the kind of child she might have?
“A child actor?” she replies, quick as you like. Relations between her and six-year-old Andrew Byrne, who played the autistic boy, appear to have been a little bumpy. “He’s in most of the scenes and he had a funny little double as well. There was him, a double who was lovely and wore a wig and — I don’t know really whether I should say — a girl, a beautiful little girl, a midget, as a stand-in. So there’d be three of them all dressed the same, and a dog, and some puppies, and a dog-wrangler and a child-wrangler. So now I know why people say don’t work with children or animals.”
The family on which After Thomas is based visited the set. I ask what the real mother thought of her portrayal. “She actually arrived at the moment [Andrew] punched me in the face. He wasn’t supposed to. It was just very naughty and it was the one moment when I broke because we’d rehearsed and rehearsed and just in the middle of it he punched me in the face. It was a scene with the dog and I was wrangling them both and I did snap and it was very naughty of me.”
Did he cry? “He didn’t cry. He was quite surprised, though. I don’t think he’s used to people raising their voices to him. Anyway that was the time when they decided to arrive. So they were watching the scene on the monitor and I went over and said, ‘Hello, nice to meet you’, and she was going (Hawes makes a thumbs-up gesture.) I think that as a parent of a normal child or an autistic child you’re patient, you’re patient and occasionally it wears thin.”
Hawes recounts all this in her tinkling cut-crystal voice that makes her a favourite for voiceovers. Another surprising thing about her is that it is not how she always spoke, but the result of elocution classes taken at the Sylvia Young Stage School.
She was brought up almost opposite the school in Marylebone, Central London, and begged to be allowed to audition for it. She was there from 9 to 16. Her father, Tony, is a London cabbie who, she confirms, talks like a London cabbie. Her near contemporaries at the school — the Spice Girl Emma Bunton, the Appleton sisters and Denise Van Outen — clearly took the lessons less seriously. But nothing about Keeley Hawes is a s surprising as her personal life. An early profile in Elle, at the time of her (mis)casting as Diana Dors in an ITV biopic, avowed: “No tabloid exposés (à la Diana Dors) or celebrity flings are likely to taint Miss Hawes’s reputation.”
At the time, 1999, she was with the graphic artist and cartoonist Spencer McCallum, whom she married not long after Myles was born. Shortly afterwards she went off to film the first season of Spooks for the BBC. There she met Macfadyen, spy Tom to her spy Zoë. One day, filming in the rain, he declared that he loved her.
She had been with McCallum for seven years and married to him for eight weeks. She has always insisted that she did not succumb there and then, but within months she had moved out of the family home in Esher, Surrey, and moved to St John’s Wood, North London. Macfadyen remained chastely in his flat in Shoreditch.
It must have been a case of good news/bad news? “Yeah, really shit news. Yes, it seems a very long time ago now — and it is, I suppose. I’m glad it’s behind us. Usually people get together and I think it’s a romantic time and lovely to look back on, but actually it wasn’t. It was just a matter of getting through it.” Happiness came later? “Yes. Yes.”
At least she must have known that, to go through all that, Matthew really wanted her? “Yeah, and we’ve outlasted the series, which is more than some people can say.” Had she suffered badly from guilt? “I did do. I really did. I’d be some sort of psychopath if I didn’t. I really did, but I’m better now. It’s the worst, worst feeling, guilt. It’s terrible. You know, I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. I know it was my own doing but it was not resting easy with me.” Did she get any professional help? “No.” Just got on with it? “Yeah.”
Happily, relations with McCallum, settled in a new relationship, have repaired to the extent that he is, even as we talk, childminding for her. She praises him for Myles, their son, turning out apparently unaffected by the confusion. “It’s down to the way that Spencer is as a human being. He’s been amazing and it shows in Myles. It really does. He’s confident, he’s happy and he has the best of all worlds. He has all the time he needs (with his father) and he has the family unit with us.” He calls Spencer “Dad” and Matthew “Matthew”? “Yes, well, he calls Matthew ‘Mah’ because he couldn’t say ‘Matthew’ when he met him. We all get on so well, my ex-husband and my husband and me. We all have a drink together and sort of socialise. It’s quite extraordinary and that’s down to him. More than anything, that’s down to him.”
It is, I say, a modern situation. She points out it is not so very modern. By the time her schooling was over at 16 she was the only child left in her class whose parents were still together. “I think that it’s pointless staying in a loveless marriage. I wasn’t in a loveless marriage but if you’re not happy, then that reflects — doesn’t it? — on your children. Happy grown-ups make for happy children. My lot seem to be coping very well and Myles has got his sister and his brother.” He likes them? “He does like them. He says I can have Maggie and he will have Ralph.”
Spooks was, then, a life-changing job for her. Personally, I have always found its solemnity borderline hilarious but millions have bought into it — a tribute, no doubt, to the actors (it can’t be the scripts). The anaesthetist who helped to deliver Ralph recognised both mother and father from it and spent six hours interrogating them about its secrets. Not long ago, in the electricals department at John Lewis, a man came up and whispered that he had applied to “work” with her. “Please don’t let him get into MI5,” she pleads.
She and Macfadyen left during the third series. “I wanted to go by then. Not because I didn’t think it was a good show. I think it’s brilliant. As everybody knows, it’s fantastic, but the six months in a windowless room, six days a week, had started to take its toll.” Since then her best work has been as Mrs Macbeth, the celebrity chef’s wife in last year’s sexy BBC update of the Scottish play — and as Steve Coogan’s wife in the movie A Cock and Bull Story, filmed while she was pregnant with Maggie. She admits it was sometimes tough being the straight woman to so many comic geniuses, not only Coogan, but Stephen Fry and Rob Brydon. “They’re not relentlessly funny,” she promises me, “but they’re quite childish in their quest to be funnier than the next one.”
A Christmas ago she was excellent as the much-fancied Fancy Day in ITV’s Hardy adaptation, Under The Greenwood Tree. This Christmas she will be even more visible, not only in After Thomas but in The Vicar of Dibley Christmas specials in which the vicar gets married. In a bit of complicated plotting, she plays her both her fiancé’s sister and his wife. Hawes is not one to gush about fellow performers, but about Dawn French’s loveliness she does.
Nothing should stop her now — unless, I speculate, it is her domestic circumstances. With her first husband needing to be close to Myles, would that prevent this golden couple decamping to Hollywood? “I’m not sure that we would want to. I mean, you don’t have to these days. That’s quite an old-fashioned thing, thinking you have to pack everything up and go. Yes, to a certain extent, out of sight, out of mind and you have to be there and keep reminding people of your existence. But then Matthew does a film like Pride and Prejudice and is up for Golden Globes.” All filmed in Northamptonshire or somewhere? “Well, exactly. It doesn’t seem to have affected his career not being there. If we had to go, we’d go for a couple of months maybe to shoot something. Spencer is self-employed. We’d work something out. It would be fine.”
The fact that she has already, at 30, had a fine career, a remarkable one for someone who had given up on acting after stage school and was content to muddle around as a model (Clearasil and Biactol ads, that sort of thing) and doing work experience on glossy magazines. It is only thanks to her old agent putting her up for a role in Dennis Potter’s ultimate work Karaoke that she is an actress at all. I ask if her parents were pleased or worried that she was getting her break in such a high-profile but sexually dubious drama. She says that they, like her, were just surprised that she was no longer in a fashion cupboard counting shoes.
The only big thing that she has missed out on was a role in Gosford Park, despite Robert Altman looking her up and down during an audition and declaring that she looked like “a prize racehorse”. “I’d like to work with him before it is too late. He is kicking on a bit.” She pauses detecting, at last, the tense in which I have phrased my last few questions. “He hasn’t died, has he?”
I give her my paper to read. With motherhood, something has to give, and for her it has clearly been finding time to follow the news. Still, it is nice to be able to surprise Keeley Hawes for a change.
- Login to post comments
- 8637 reads