FAR FROM THE JOSHUA TREE
Actress Eve Hewson hopes recent string of successful roles will help move her from under the shadow of her famous father, Bono,
Eve Hewson can pinpoint when she fell in love with acting.
She was 15 and her tutor, Erica Dunton, had offered her a role as a teenage Irish hitchhiker in a movie called The 27 Club.
Apart from the hitchhiking bit, “it wasn’t too far from who I was, to be honest,” Hewson says on the phone from New York, where she now lives.
Hewson, who’s about to turn 27, was born in Ireland. You may have heard of her father, a chap named Paul Hewson, a.k.a. Bono of U2.
Anyway, she went off to North Carolina to shoot the movie (“It was supposed to be a month; my mom was like, ‘You’re not taking my baby away from me for longer than two weeks’ ”) and fell in love on the set — “That’s the moment I decided this is what I want to do with my life.”
Her dad and mom, Ali, came around after Eve was accepted by New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. It’s worked out rather well since then.
Among the roles Hewson is known for are playing the daughter of Tom Hanks’ character in the Oscar-nominated
Bridge of Spies; the daughter of James Gandolfini’s character in
Enough Said, the late Sopranos actor’s second-last role; and Lucy Elkins, an early 20th-century nurse who becomes an accomplice to a cocaine-addicted doctor in the Steven Soderbergh TV series The Knick.
She’ll also be seen as Maid Marian in the Lionsgate reboot of Robin Hood, due in November. But first up is Paper Year, out this Friday, a Canadian film in which Hewson and Avan Jogia ( Tut) play newlyweds enduring a rocky first year of marriage.
Doing the romantic drama was a “no-brainer,” Hewson says.
After reading the script, she thought writer/director Rebecca Addelman, a London, Ont., native known for her work on TV’s New Girl and Love, was “really talented and really funny, and had a very specific voice that I felt related to my life and my friends’ lives.”
They had a two-hour Skype chat “about relationships, heartbreak and your first love. I just really loved her as a woman and I loved her perspective.”
Hewson hasn’t yet seen big changes in the types of roles available to women, despite greater awareness of the male domination of the entertainment industry.
“I’m still in the girlfriend (role) zone, which I hope to get out of soon,” she says. She believes there will be more of a shift in the next few years following the success of female-led movies such as Wonder Woman and Ocean’s 8.
She has worked with a lot of female directors and also “really great” men, including Soderbergh, who gave her her first job out of college in The Knick.
“I think of that as getting my master’s in acting,” Hewson says.
“That was where I really found my own confidence in my own ability to perform.”
It also enabled people to see her as an actress and not just Bono’s daughter, she adds.
Having a famous father has its advantages, like the ease with which she was able to get meetings with agents compared to her drama-school friends, but also disadvantages.
“It’s been hard for me to establish myself independent from him, but I do think your work kind of speaks for itself. People respond to you. That all sort of fades away,” she says.
“I’m hoping that happens with Paper Year and with the next few movies that come out.”
Her goal, she says, is to try new genres and characters with every project, and to continue doing work that “scares me.”
“Whenever I sign on to something I always think I can’t do it, I’ll never be good enough, it’s impossible and somehow I always manage to do it,” she says.
“There’s a feeling of grand fulfilment at the end of the project where you’ve kind of thrown yourself into uncharted territory.”
Debra Yeo is a deputy entertainment editor and a contributor to the Star's Entertainment section. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @realityeo