Queen of Stream
EVE Hewson’s trajectory continues upward with her leading role in John Carney’s latest almost-musical, Flora And Son. And with positive reviews so far, the film’s release on Apple TV on Friday looks set to carry on the actress’s recent habit of landing roles in audiencefriendly productions on the big streaming platforms.
It caps a recent turnaround in her career after early promise with roles opposite Clive Owen and Tom Hanks turned into less celebrated roles.
Her first leading roles were a mixed bag, among them the well-received Canadian indie romantic drama Paper Year and the less well-received mega-budget Robin Hood, both released in 2018.
And even what in previous times would have been a big breakthrough as a lead in a 2020 BBC production, The Luminaries, based on a Booker Prize-winning novel, failed to catch fire with audiences.
The six-part period drama, in which Ms Hewson took the role of Anna Wetherell – an adventurous spirit who moves from the UK to New Zealand
The film reviews so far have been positive
during the gold rush of the 1860s, was warmly reviewed by critics.
But it scored a rating of only 6.2 on the movie and TV website IMDB. And while it has since made it on to both Apple TV and Amazon Prime, the series was the last major terrestrial TV production she was involved in.
The following year Ms Hewson took a leading role in the Netflix mini-series Behind Her Eyes, a psychological thriller based on the 2017 novel by Sarah Pinborough. She played Adele, the wife of Dr David Ferguson, whose affair with an employee sets up an increasingly unsettling love triangle.
Despite some mediocre reviews, the six-part series was one of Netflix’s 20 most-watched shows in 2021 and has an IMDB user rating of 7.2. In online terms, a rating above seven is considered a key indicator of audience satisfaction.
Ms Hewson is currently filming the second series of Sharon Horgan’s acclaimed black murder-mystery comedy Bad Sisters – also an Apple TV production – in which she plays the slightly bratty baby sister Becka.
Its first season was adored by critics and audiences alike, and it has an impressive 8.3 rating on IMDB.
In her latest project with Apple, she plays a single mother of a 14-year-old boy in Flora And Son, a comedy-drama with music at its heart, from the director of Once and Sing Street.
The film is getting a limited release in Irish cinemas but will debut on the major streaming platform this week – with audiences expected to watch this intimate tale largely from the comfort of their own homes.
Looking to disrupt her young son’s habit of getting into trouble, Flora buys him a guitar, but the instrument is received with little enthusiasm.
Rather than let the unwanted present gather dust, she decides to give it a go herself and finds a guitar teacher online – a laid-back Californian played by Inception star Joseph Gorden-Levitt. Ms Hewson’s stab at an inner-city Dublin accent betrays her Killiney upbringing somewhat, but she is magnetic as Flora, crackling opposite guitar teacher Gorden-Levitt (yes, they fall in love) and Jack Reynor, who plays her boy’s slightly delusional ‘musician’ father.
Son Max is played by 16-year-old newcomer Orén Kinlan, son of Laurence Kinlan who is best known for playing Elmo in Love/Hate but who had more than 20 film credits before that.
The younger Kinlan’s casting probably won’t provoke the same ‘nepo baby’ jibes that Ms Hewson has inevitably faced as the daughter of one of the world’s most famous musicians, Bono.
But anyone who has seen the U2 frontman’s 32-year-old daughter on screen knows she is there on merit, and her star looks set to remain in the ascendant.
Ms Hewson’s first TV credit of course was in 2015 when she played nurse Lucy Elkins in two seasons of medical drama The Knick, directed by Steven Soderbergh (of Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s Eleven, and Magic Mike fame) and also starring Clive Owen. It scores very high on IMDB with a rating of 8.5.