Eve Hewson Cover Interview on Her Career, Family, and Bad Sisters

Eve Hewson was at the airport last month. It was an October day, and she was flying from New York to London and flying even higher from the viral success of her Netflix limited series The Perfect Couple and the imminent return of the critically acclaimed Apple TV+ series Bad Sisters. The 33-year-old actress, who’s been working professionally since she was 15, has been, well, “famous” for a long time. And she’s constantly on an airplane. But 24 hours before our interview, she felt something shift. At the airport, she saw that folks were looking at her directly, studying her, and noticing her. Suddenly, while in line for security, a woman beside her starts crying uncontrollably. “She was scared to get on a plane,” Hewson remembers, speaking via Zoom from her hotel room.

“She was just hysterical,” Hewson says. “I started talking to her, trying to calm her down in the line.” The two got through security and went their separate ways. “Then I got a DM from her this morning.” 

Hewson stares at me, looking blankly into the screen. Her blue eyes glow. She folds herself further into her New York City souvenir hoodie. She’s patiently waiting for me to get it. 

Oh. They had not exchanged names.

“I was like, how would she have known my name to find me on Instagram?” she says with a chuckle. “She didn’t act like she knew my name. She was just crying over her fear of flying. So, stuff like that is different now. I didn’t think people were recognizing me. They are. That’s completely changed since The Perfect Couple.”

Welcome to the big time, Eve Hewson. 

That sudsy Netflix series, co-starring Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Meghann Fahy, and Dakota Fanning, held as the number-one viewed program on the platform for three weeks. If you’ve somehow missed the Nantucket-set murder mystery, based on Elin Hilderbrand’s novel of the same name, it played out as a Have-Not (Hewson’s character) was set to marry into a family of Outrageously Haves. For whatever reason—a little ’80s primetime soap sexiness, a little bit of ’90s thriller-movie tension, the “2000s flash mob” opening theme song sequence—the show had everyone talking. Come to think of it, that opening number on the beach, which spawned a spate of TikToks, did make a strong case for the return of TV show theme songs.

“I know, right?” Hewson agrees. “While we were shooting, Susanne [Bier the director] was like, ‘Oh, I think Meghan Trainor is going to give us one of her songs for the opening credits.’ And we were like, ‘ok, that’s cool.’” Trainor is from Cape Cod. “Love Meghan, by the way.” Near the end of shooting, Bier played the song, “Criminals,” with its deep, driving bassline for the cast. Then she broke that there would be a line-dance scene on the beach. 

“I don’t think anybody thought it would end up as the opening credits. I don’t know why we didn’t connect the dots. I think we were all just in denial and thinking there’s absolutely no way this dance is going to make it in the show.” As the show was edited and packaged, as various producers and directors talked to the cast, they all asked each other, “What about the dance?” No one heard anything. “We’re in the clear,” Hewson said they all reassured each other. “Then boom. It was the opening credits.” For every episode.

“But what’s funny is the reaction really warmed my heart,” Hewson says. “Because I was getting videos of my friend’s parents getting up and doing the dance. I was just getting all these really funny videos from people and realized people love this stuff. People want to have a good time. They want to dance, they want to just get involved. We don’t have to make depressing work all the time. How wonderful is that?”

And while the ending of the book is pretty final, the series, as Kidman visits Hewson for a one-on-one chat, does end with a bit of a, huh? Does this continue… ? 

“Everyone has been like, what do you think? Do you think she got lunch with Greer?” Hewson says. For her part, she doesn’t think so. “No, I think Amelia [her character] went through a traumatic experience with this family. One of the family members killed her best friend. I think she’s living in London, hanging out with the penguins, trying to move on. I did hear something that Nicole was playing with the idea of a season two.” Hewson stops. “I mean, I would work with all of them again in a heartbeat. Some of them are my best friends. I just don’t know how Amelia would fit into another season. I feel like she is just trying to have a peaceful life.”

***

So is Hewson. She is happy at 33. “I feel so good,” she says earnestly with her delicate Irish lilt, smiling and nodding in agreement with her words. “I feel like I’ve just started living. Don’t know what the hell was going on in my twenties. It was confusing and really fun, but I definitely get why people say, ‘Oh, once you get to your forties, you’re just free. Because already, in my thirties, I don’t want to do things I don’t want to do. I hang out with the people I like and do the things that I like and don’t feel that pressure of, ‘I have to do this’. I care less about what people think of me. Heaven! I go to work, [and] do work that makes me happy. And then I go home and take a bath and I’m just chilling. I just don’t have any drama in my 33rd year.”

One way to avoid drama is to avoid the industry that’s paid to manufacture it. Hewson doesn’t live a Hollywood life, she says. Her friends are doctors and social workers—non-celebs, in other words. And the way she puts it, she was raised by a down-to-earth rock icon (Bono) and an activist and entrepreneur (Ali Hewson), surrounded by three close siblings, and actually likes going to work. In her own words, Eve Hewson is “just” an actor who has been acting for almost 20 years.

“I grew up seeing my dad work all day,” she says of her early years in Dublin, watching her father lead the band U2. “Every day, from the moment he woke up at five o’clock in the morning, he would get up, write for two hours, and then read, and then start his phone calls. And he did not stop working until he fell asleep at 10 o’clock at night. I’ve seen him do that for my entire life. Of course, when I was younger, he would come home a lot later because they used to record late into the night.”

It’s worth underscoring that what her father did off-stage left more of an impression on Hewson. “I’ve seen how much work it takes behind the scenes that people don’t understand or recognize. The success people see in magazines or online, or wherever they’re getting their information, is such a small amount of the work actually going on. And that’s been a great training ground for me, to know how much you have to commit yourself to something. And I think a lot of young actors don’t have that knowledge; don’t really understand the amount of work put into the craft. Lady Gaga is not actually out partying all the time. She’s working her ass off.” She giggles. “Okay, Charli XCX is maybe out a little bit more than Lady Gaga, but she’s not actually partying all the time. These people work. They’re dedicated to their craft. But you only see a tiny bit of that when they become successful.”

Hewson’s future operating system—work: great; fame: nah—was being installed around the time she decided to pursue acting. “I was a very goth teenager, I was just angsty!” And in need of some help in school. “I had no attention span. I just was away with the fairies in my head. And I also have a huge authority problem.” Her parents got her a tutor. 

“As it turns out, she was only tutoring on the side,” Hewson says. She was actually an aspiring English filmmaker, Erica Dunton, who would go on to write and direct films and series including Ted Lasso, Bad Monkey, You, and Outer Banks. Hewson and her sister, Jordan, visited the set of Dunton’s short film. “At one point, Erica let me sit in front of the camera, and she said, ‘Oh, you’ve got some pretty good talent.’ And I was like, ‘I know, yeah, this is what I’m meant to do!’” Hewson remembers the moment of hubris with a laugh. “But then she ended up writing an actual full-length independent movie, 27 Club, and wrote a part for me in it when I was 15.” By that point, she remembers, my parents were freaking out. “For some reason, they had wanted me to be an architect.”

I reached out to Dunton, who was thrilled to relive Hewson’s film debut, somewhat presciently titled Lost & Found. “Eve was 13 years old and she immediately fell in love with all of it—the acting, the crew, film. She was the happiest [teenager] to wake up at 5:30 a.m. for the early calls. We all watched her, in real time, find her place in the world.” 

“[My parents] were like, ‘Oh my god, this is what she wants to do.’ They just didn’t want me to move to Hollywood. They didn’t want me to get caught up in the movie business. I mean, look at the music industry, at the movie industry—it is stark. There’s a lot of bad shit out there. They were concerned for their 15-year-old child that, all of a sudden, came home and was like: I want to be an actress. They were like, ‘Oh god, no. Please be an architect.’”

Hewson says she has no idea where the architectural fixation originated with her parents. Nevertheless, she eventually enrolled at New York University to study drama and, early on, got a small part in the 2011 film This Must Be the Place with Sean Penn and Frances McDormand. “I had just finished my first year of school and so I was a very intense thespian. I do remember walking up to set on my first day and being really nervous on the inside.” Then it was time to do a scene with McDormand. “She made me laugh, she relaxed me,” Hewson says, noting the Oscar winner’s generosity in using humor to get her to a comfortable place in front of the camera. “All of a sudden, I was out of my head. And I remember doing some takes and she’d be like, ‘That was the one. That was the one.’ Just those little bits of encouragement.”

“I actually bumped into her randomly on the street in New York a year ago,” Hewson says, “and I looked at her, and she looked at me and said, ‘Yes. Yes.’ I was like, Oh my god. I hadn’t seen her in so long. And she just goes: ‘Keep going. I’m watching. Keep going.’”

Hewson has had her highs (the 2015 Steven Spielberg film Bridge of Spies, the 2014 series The Knick) and lows. Also known as “noes.”

“I mean, so many noes,” she says, shaking her head. “At the beginning of auditioning and when I was a teenager, I would be completely heartbroken over not getting things. And what I’ve learned is I’ve never been steered wrong. When things don’t work out, I know that, in a few years, that reason will come. And I’ll be like, ‘That’s why I didn’t do that movie.’” Still, it’s hard, she acknowledges. A Hollywood career is guaranteed heartbreak. “A lot of noes, but you get used to it.”

She bravely revisits some. “I remember when I was younger auditioning for The Hunger Games. I remember auditioning for Alice in Wonderland. Gone Girl, but it wasn’t for Rosamund Pike’s role. It was for a much smaller part, and I didn’t get it. But I ended up getting my role in The Knick. And I was like, oh, if I had gotten that, I wouldn’t have been able to do the two years that I had on the show.”

Hewson is proud of the longevity she’s built. “I think I heard Katy Perry say recently, ‘There are no 10-year accidents.’ To keep finding success and great work that people respond to is a lifelong commitment.

***

In 2015, Hewson was interviewed for Town & Country. In the interview, she talked about her discomfort in Los Angeles. “L.A. is an interesting town to be in,” she told the magazine, “because it makes you realize how not successful you are.” I asked her, are you any more comfortable in Hollywood now?

“Totally,” she jokes, immediately puffing up. “I run that town. I made that town my bitch.” And dissolves into giggles.

“After I graduated from NYU, I moved to L.A. for about a year. I was auditioning and all of that, and I remember—god!—just feeling so insecure and so out of place.” She remembers long, sunny days driving around and walking into audition rooms and ultimately feeling invisible. “And when people do look at you: ‘Okay, yeah, thanks so much.’ And they shoo you off. It was challenging.” She’s not kidding when she says it all got to her. “I’d do an audition for something, and then a year later I was driving past the billboard for the movie I didn’t get on my way to another audition. It has a way of playing with your mental health.”

But she has had a support system the whole way. She refers to her father as a stage dad. “He can’t help it. It’s how he’s led a band for 46 years or however long. He’s just constantly coming up with new ideas and things, and he really wants everybody to reach their potential.” But then her mom, “She’s proud of me, but she’s not like, ‘Oh my god, you’re a star! Honey, you’re a star!’” She quotes the well-known Kris Jenner meme. “She’s definitely not all, ‘You’re doing amazing, sweetie!’ She always says: You just have to have a sense of humor about everything. She was like, no matter what, you have to laugh it off. She has a very grounded approach to life.”

Her mom is hard to impress, however. “My dad has been trying to do that forever,” she says with a laugh. “And she’s just so effortlessly beautiful—she does not do much. She does wash her face, but not really. She’s not into all that beauty stuff. My sister and I are the skincare freaks, and whenever someone has something new, it’s like, what is that? Oh my god, what does that do? Should I get it? So, I’d say I am the most skincare obsessed because I’m a Cancer. I’m into self-care and taking baths, doing face masks and watching a movie while hanging out with my cat and doing a laser LED light. I have every gadget you could ever think of.” Hewson steals her dad’s products too. “His Augustinus Bader face cream. Which is a real benefit of our relationship because his assistant bought it for him, and he obviously does not wash his face and doesn’t care, and it’s just in his bathroom. It’s really expensive, amazing face cream. And so I go in there when I’m home, use it all, and he is none wiser.”

She sits up straight and leans in with a big smile. “By the way, have you heard of this woman online called Anastasia Beauty Fascia?” I have not, I tell her. “She basically has reconstructed her face through massage and says that with age, your muscles start to sag and your face gets lower and blah, blah, blah, blah. So, on the set of Bad Sisters, we all started doing face yoga.”

***

My first question to Eve Hewson when we came face-to-face over Wi-Fi was: What character you’ve played is most like you?

“Becka, for sure,” she says, naming Becka Garvey, who she plays on Bad Sisters, which returns for its second season on November 13. Her character is the youngest, rough around the edges, and a bit of a drinker. The show revolves around a group of, yes, sisters who, in the first season, decide to kill one of their husbands, a very abusive man known colloquially on the show as The Prick. Then set about making sure they got away with it. “She just rang true to who I feel I once was as a teenager. That’s because Sharon [Horgan, the show’s star and creator] is Irish and the characters are Irish and she’s an Irish writer and it’s directed by an Irish director.”

(The second question I asked her: Which character have you played would you most like to have a drink with? “Oh! Adele from Behind Her Eyes,” she says immediately with glee, naming her 2021 Netflix psychological thriller series. “She’d probably be wearing some fabulous outfit, drinking a martini. We’d probably meet somewhere really fabulous. She’d be totally insane and manipulative, and I would have the time of my life.”)

It’s impossible to separate Hewson from her heritage. It goes beyond the surface, but, sure, her looks (fair, luminescent skin, dark hair, blue eyes) are certainly Irish. Nor to underestimate the geo-cultural impact Bad Sisters—in all its salty, spicy, layered, and very, very funny storytelling and ultimate word-of-mouth, evangelical success—had on the overall mojo of the country.

“Oh my god, I think when it came out in Ireland, it spread like wildfire and was kind of amazing. It really was word of mouth. And it got to a point where my mom would call me on a Friday and she’d be like, it’s Bad Sisters’ day. Everybody down at the pub is talking about it. They’re all going home to watch it. And it just felt the entire country was glued in and behind us and rooting for us.”

To say nothing of the deep meaning behind the dark humor of killing a verbally toxic and physically dangerous husband. “The history of what’s happened to women in our country is really dark. But the fact is, our show really is about sisterhood and female empowerment. And then it became such a popular show for everybody.” She is proud of the big tent their little show provided. But of course, the annoying question is: Can they avoid that whole sophomore slump hit shows can experience? The new season takes place two years after the death of The Prick, which was ruled accidental. But secrets are surfacing. Hewson seems genuinely worried about the fan reaction. “I hope that they like season two as much as they like season one. I think they will. But, yeah, I am nervous.”

It’s not just Eve or Sharon. Or Bad Sisters. There is an Irish moment happening in Hollywood. We joke that they might be outpacing Aussies as the hot import, what with Barry Keoghan, Andrew Scott, Kerry Condon, and Paul Mescal joining Cillian Murphy, Colin Farrell, Saoirse Ronan, Liam Neeson, and Michael Fassbender all now in the canon of bonafide Irish movie stars. And over on the set of Bad Sisters, they take their cultural export seriously. “It’s homemade,” Hewson says. “The cultural nuances are so important. We’ve actually had somewhat of a back and forth with studio execs in America from Apple who sometimes would say, We don’t really understand this word. Why do you call the cops the ‘guardee?’ And we’d say, ‘That’s because we’re Irish, and that makes sense here.’ So [that’s] been an interesting dance. We’ve had to make some concessions so that it’s accessible to everybody in the world. But I think we’ve managed to keep it truly authentically us and we’ve thrown in so many Irish-isms that I think the Irish audience really cherish and appreciate. I also honestly think that international audiences prefer authenticity over packaged, made-for-everybody, one-size-fits-all kind of storytelling.”

She also threw in moments of true Eve Hewson authenticity this season. “In real life, I only wear really crazy socks. So Becka’s combination of socks and sandals is my one little Eve–Becka thing. Costume designer Camille Benda, in our first fitting for season one, was like, you could wear, I don’t know, maybe socks with sandals. And I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve found my character.’ And now what she does is at every fitting, she lays out all these different socks with all different kinds of prints on them, pictures, whatever, socks with food on them, and all these things. And she’s like, you’re an artist. Pick your combination!”

And that’s just it—Hewson lives an artist’s life. We, her fans, the public, and Hollywood at large want her to be a “Capital S Star,” but she’s not having any of it. As Dunton told me, “Eve is a person who can act. For all actors now there is a social media, celebrity side that they have to dip in and out of and I think Eve does a great job of managing that. She’s not driven by a desire to be famous, she’s driven by the desire to evolve her craft and collaborate with talented directors and seek out elevated scripts with characters that speak to her.” For Hewson, that means another Spielberg film and a new Hulu series co-starring Murray Bartlett, Downforce, taking place in the world of Formula 1. (“I went after that part hard,” she admits, “I stalked them.”), Oh, and she’s getting ready for the holidays.

That means going home to where she learned to be an artist. Where she can revisit her roots, recharge her creative spirit, and remember why she’s doing all of this. “Well, I don’t really celebrate Thanksgiving, but I do live in America, so I usually piggyback on someone’s family in Los Angeles.” She says she grew to love Thanksgiving. “When we were in college, me and my sister had American boyfriends. So my mom started doing a Thanksgiving dinner for them because they would want to come with us to Ireland. And so it became a tradition.” But for Christmas, the entire Hewson clan comes home. “I see my Granny and all of our friends from school, and everybody goes to the pub on Christmas Eve. The whole street is just filled with Irish people.” She takes a deep breath, seemingly reassured at the very thought of that.

“Like it should be, right?” she asks, with what looked like a wink.