When Keeley Hawes played the Home Secretary in Jed Mercurio’s 2018 hit BBC series Bodyguard, it was well known that she based her ill-fated (and frolicsome) character Julia Montague on the then actual top female minister, Amber Rudd.
So when I tell Hawes I have a question from Rudd (currently retired from political life), a look of excitement, with only a flicker of trepidation, crosses the actor’s familiar features. “Oh, okayeeee,” she grins, and claps her hands. Here it is: You play wonderful English roses and then the opposite. Which is more like the real you: Julia Montague or Louisa Durrell?
“Oh, that is a very good question. I think –hmm – I think there is a little bit of me in both of them,” she answers, followed by a huge, possibly slightly nervous, laugh.
You once said Montague is a woman who won’t stand for any kind of bulls**t. “Yes, I probably lent a bit of that to her from myself.”
Writer Russell T Davies also has a question (Hawes is in his new Channel 4 drama, It’s A Sin – see page 12), saying, “I’ve never seen an actor be so happy to be on set! Most people hurry back to their trailers, but you stay and watch everything – with a huge smile. Have you always been like that? What keeps you there?”
Another huge laugh. “Ummm – ooohhh!” Hawes gives a little squeak as though she has just been goosed. “What keeps me there? Well, It’s A Sin was a particularly happy, warm set, I have to say, in spite of the subject matter. Shaun Dooley, who plays my husband, and I are sort of sprinkled throughout the first four episodes and I’m really only in episode five. So to come in and out of a show like that can be quite daunting, as you’re not on set all day every day. I can certainly find it so.”
She was, she says, grateful to the show’s young cast for making her feel comfortable, particularly Olly Alexander, who plays her son. “We have some very difficult scenes to do together and that made all the difference. It wasn’t a set that you wanted to run away from.”
Keeley is talking over Zoom from the south London home she shares with her husband, Succession star Matthew Macfadyen, their children Maggie and Ralph, and Buster, a large shaggy tawny-pelted poodle, who interrupts our chat from time to time by leaping up in a bid for attention. Also at home is the 44-year-old actor’s oldest child, Myles, 20, by her first husband, DJ Spencer McCallum.
In most of her roles (with the exception of Line of Duty’s drab Lindsay Denton), Hawes’s appearance ranges from fragrant to glamorous. Even on Zoom, which can be unflattering, she is gleaming and poised in a cream blouse, with that big radiant grin. I had read that she was a dykon, which to me sounded like a vegetable. “Isn’t that a dyke icon?” she chips in. “I hope so!” It might date back to one of her breakthrough TV roles as male impersonator Kitty Butler in BBC2’s 2002 adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Victorian-era lesbian coming-of-age romance Tipping the Velvet.
We cannot move onto her latest drama Finding Alice without touching on the beloved The Durrells, particularly as the two ITV dramas share a creative team. Hawes talks about Louisa Durrell with such affection it sounds as though she’s keen to resurrect “Mrs Durrells” (so named by gorgeous Spiro, the chauffeur). “I am dying to – I should have sat here with her Kalimera apron on, which I do wear sometimes when I’m washing the dog. It’s a brilliant apron. And I’ve got her high-waisted white sailor trousers, too.”
She really, really wants The Durrells to return for a Christmas special. “I think we’ve got to put this out in the ether. We would all love that. So often in 2020, I was receiving messages from all sorts of people saying, ‘Thank you for this bit of joy during lockdown. We have been rewatching The Durrells and it has been just the sunshine escapism that we’ve needed’.”
So to Finding Alice, ITV’s six-part drama tracing (dread words) “the journey” faced by Alice (Hawes) when Harry, her partner of two decades, dies after falling down the minimalist staircase on the first night in the new “smart” house he has designed for his wife. In the aftermath, a mass of secrets and debts are unearthed. There are strong roles for Hawes, Joanna Lumley (splendid as ever at 74) as her judgemental madam of a mother, Sarah, and for 18-year-old newcomer Isabella Pappas as Alice’s daughter, Charlotte.
Finding Alice also reunites Hawes with Roger Goldby, a director on The Durrells, and Simon Nye, who adapted Gerald Durrell’s books for TV. Hawes’s company Buddy Club Productions is a co-producer, and her name is on the credits as a co-creator. So did this idea come from some long meals in tavernas on Corfu?
“Well, there certainly were some conversations in tavernas – you’ve got that spot on!” she laughs. “It came out of lots of conversations. We loved working together – it was a great dynamic between the three of us. By series three, really, we had all made noises about how we’d love to develop something together.”
What interested the trio was not so much exploring death but grief. This was long before Ricky Gervais’s moving Netflix series After Life, which features a man struggling to cope after the death of his wife.
“None of us could possibly have known about that at the time, and we thought it would be a rich emotion to mine, since it’s something we all share,” she says. “While we all experience it in different ways, it’s something that affects everyone. We have to get better at talking about death and not be embarrassed by it.”
Finding Alice strikes quite an unusual tone, veering from comic to dark with suspenseful moments. Alice is capable of making some spectacularly clumsy comments. “Well, that makes her really interesting. She’s constantly putting her foot in it. She’s not a bad person –she’s just honest to a fault.”
Not unlike her screen mother? “Yes, she’s a wonderful mix of both her parents. I’m the love child of Joanna Lumley and Nigel Havers!” she exclaims, tickled by the thought.
Hawes has been spared COVID (she touches the wooden table in front of her) but knows people who haven’t. “Everybody does, don’t they? Grief, weirdly, has been all around.” In the past, she has talked about how she has suffered from depression and, like most of us, has had her moments during lockdown. “We have, and I have so much sympathy – loneliness has been a huge factor for some people, and losing loved ones.”
What have Hawes and her family done to keep their spirits up? “We were very lucky last year because we were all here, five of us, happily, and we did a week of Come Dine with Me – each of us did a day and an evening, and we watched lots of dark documentaries [favourites were The Jinx and The Staircase, which both explore high-profile murder cases]. I’ve watched too much news and I’ve read and sadly, I quite like doing embroidery as well,” she says, mock-ruefully.
This takes us onto Judi Dench’s love of embroidering cushions on set “like a lovely old lady” (the actors shared the screen on BBC Two’s 2016 Shakespeare production The Hollow Crown). “At the end of filming, she’d give them as presents and they’d say things like ‘F*** You!’ When I heard that, it made me love her more.”
I wonder, as we wrap things up, if she has any tattoos (Dench famously had a temporary one done in honour of Harvey Weinstein a long time before his public shaming). “No, I don’t. But
I might get one of Judi, actually!”
Finding Alice airs tonight on ITV at 9pm. If you’re looking for something to watch in the meantime, check out our TV Guide.
This interview originally appeared in the Radio Times magazine. For the biggest interviews and the best TV listings subscribe to Radio Times now and never miss a copy.
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