Keeley Hawes Interview: On Family, Feminism & Beating Depression

The daughter of a black-cab driver, Hawes was a pupil at the stage school Sylvia Young, which was across the road from the family flat in Marylebone, London, a contemporary of Emma Bunton and Melanie Blatt. After leaving, she flirted with modelling (“I wasn’t very good”) and then, when she was 17, her agent rang to say she had a role in Dennis Potter’s Karaoke series. The call any actress would want, I say. Yes, she agrees. She didn’t have a clue who Potter was, of course. “But now I know it was the call I always wanted,” she says, laughing.
2014 was a stellar year for Hawes, kicking off with the popular and critically acclaimed Line of Duty. She also filmed High-Rise, a feature film based on the nightmarish JG Ballard novel, alongside Tom Hiddleston and Sienna Miller, and played Elizabeth I in BBC Two’s The Hollow Crown, a mini-series of Shakespeare adaptations (“the most frightening thing I’ve ever done”) starring Dame Judi Dench. Both will come out later this year. It ended in glorious style with a role as a villainous banker in Doctor Who. “I was so excited because the children could finally watch me in something and then it came to the scene where Mummy’s head was crushed and they weren’t too sure about that.”
She doesn’t think she would have won any of those roles or Samantha Mollison if it hadn’t been for DCI Lindsay Denton in Line of Duty. Previous roles hadn’t allowed her to express her dark side. “And I really have got one,” she says drily. She has played a lot of cops before, most notably in Ashes to Ashes, the 1980s-set sequel to Life on Mars, which, against expectations, she managed to make her own, but the characters had often been on the more glamorous side of danger. Denton, however, was a complicated, corruptible, down-trodden, piano-playing mess. Goodie or baddie, it was anyone’s guess. “Lindsay really didn’t give a f— if anyone liked her,” Hawes says. “There was no vanity to her.”
A particularly memorable scene in the series showed Denton getting busy with a broken wine bottle and a neighbour’s head. “I thought there might be some sort of backlash against the physical violence there,” Hawes says. “But it was amazing how many people came up and patted me on the back and said, ‘Oh, well done for that. Good on you!’”
A slightly worrying reflection on the tastes of the British public perhaps, but still, Lindsay was the kind of three-dimensional female character who is even now a rarity on television. “It does make you slightly want to scream when you do [a role] like that,” Hawes says, “and people say, ‘Oh, that’s amazing. Oh, women can do that?’ Like it’s some great surprise. Because why couldn’t we? It is frustrating.”
She thinks that people assume actresses won’t want to play physically unappealing characters. “I was asked to do a role once where I would have had to have worn really bad false teeth. The director literally couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t get there on the day and say, ‘No, actually, forget it.’ But I couldn’t wait to not have any make-up on. My vanity left me a long time ago.” She laughs. “In my youth I was somebody who didn’t leave home without a bit of mascara. That’s all out the window now; I am not that person. I’ve got three children and I really don’t care. You go out a couple of times without make-up on and nobody acts any differently. It’s fine.”
Hawes is 39 this month, heading into a traditionally difficult time for actresses. She, however, is optimistic that her age might work in her favour. “I think that you only have to look at our TV screens at the moment to see maybe there is a change happening, with Olivia Colman in Broadchurch, Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Honourable Woman and Gillian Anderson in The Fall. These aren’t 20-year-olds. These are women with a bit of life experience.” Also, she says, she doesn’t want to moan about the type of roles open to women when she has spent 20 years working quite happily. “It would be an odd thing for me to bitch about, to be honest. And if that makes me not very feminist…”
But she is a feminist? “I am a feminist, but I can’t bitch about something that I haven’t directly experienced. Of course, there are a lot of window-dressing roles and you make the best of what you can out of that. You are not going to turn work down when you have a family, when you have bills to pay, and you have to work. It would be all well and good to say, ‘I’m not going to work unless it’s some big meaty part…’ but you would f—ing sit there for ever. You would be down the dole office.”
Endearingly, Hawes touches wood when she talks about work, although she and Macfadyen have clocked up an impressive number of screen hours between them. Which seems more impressive because they have three children (a son, aged 14, from Hawes’ brief first marriage, to the cartoonist Spencer McCallum, and a boy of eight and a girl of 10).
The day before we meet I read a Tweet pondering whether journalists would start asking the actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who has recently announced that he and his wife are expecting a child, how he will balance fatherhood and his career. What does Hawes think? “No,” she replies. “No, they’re not. My husband, I don’t think, is ever asked the question, but I am every time I do something. Every single time. It’s quite interesting, because I think our careers are quite similar, we are sort of on the same level, so you would think that as we are together and share our children it might be of interest, but no, he is just asked about his craft.” (For the record, they do share the childcare and they don’t have a nanny.)
There are signs that their youngest son may have inherited the thespian gene, having dressed up as an urchin extra on the set of Ripper Street, in which Macfadyen stars. “When Matthew got home, Ralph said, ‘Daddy, did I get the part?’ and my husband said, ‘Well, it’s not really a part as such. It’s more running around in the background.’ Ralph replied, ‘In the background?’ He was really disgusted. He thought that he and Matthew would be having a scene. He said, ‘But I wanted to wear a velvet top hat!’”
Last year Hawes spoke openly about having suffered from depression on and off all her life. “This weather doesn’t help, does it?” she says, gesturing to the wintry 3pm dusk. “This country doesn’t help. But experience does help. You recognise the signs and what needs to be done. You need strategies personal to you.” Exercise, change of diet? “Yes, all the things that people tend to recommend, that are the last thing you want to do when you are feeling like that. I suppose when work’s going well, that helps, but it’s not the cure. Having other people who rely on you, like three kids, forces you into not being in a state where you could stay in bed, because you just can’t.”
We talk about something else – being 40 and whether she is bothered (she’s not) – and then she returns to the subject. “When I was walking the dog one day I saw a memorial quote on a bench: ‘Every day is the first day of the rest of your life.’ And that kind of stuck with me as a mantra,” she says. “I’m someone who gets anxious. I worry about what people think of me and get over-emotional. I lie in bed thinking, ‘Oh God, I wish I hadn’t done that,’ and think about things I said when I was a teenager! It’s torture. But I read that and thought, ‘Give yourself a break.’ It’s not about what has been. Today is a new day. I know it’s wacky. Am I sounding like a lunatic?” she asks. No, I say, she really is not.

Keeley Hazell