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SECRETS AND SPIES
After Bodyguard, Keeley Hawes play a has ditched the glamour to dowdy, music-loving civil servant in new thriller series Traitors. from And, she tells Lisa Sewards the set, no one can be trusted...
Keeley Hawes reveals how she had to sing for her supper while playing a dowdy civil servant in Channel 4’s new post-war series Traitors
Keeley Hawes returns to Westminster’s corridors of power in new Channel 4 post-war spy thriller Traitors this week – but her role is a world away from the glamorous and seductive home secretary Julia Montague in last year’s Bodyguard. The nation was spellbound over six spine-tingling episodes of Bodyguard as David Budd (Richard Madden), the personal protection officer assigned to look after the home secretary, repeatedly put his life on the line to save hers and then succumbed to her advances before she was blown up by a terrorist bomb – sparking endless online conspiracy theories as to whether she really was dead.
The final episode drew an astonishing 15.9 million viewers, but while Keeley probably won’t be part of the planned second series, she’s back at Whitehall as a frumpy, bespectacled civil servant with a penchant for Gilbert & Sullivan in Traitors.
Without a scrap of make-up and dressed in a drab grey suit, white blouse and brown tights twinned with sensible black shoes, Keeley’s strait-laced Priscilla Garrick couldn’t be further from the glamorous characters she usually plays.
‘It’s a very different type of role to Bodyguard, of course,’ she says when we meet on location in north London. ‘Priscilla’s a spinster and a perfectionist. When my daughter Maggie found some of my scripts she said, “Mmm. Pris-killer!” So she’s now known in my house as Pris-killer. I’m a perfectionist myself, so I’m quite like Priscilla. I like things to be a certain way and if they’re not I think, “This is winding me up.” But that’s what Priscilla is – very, very ordered.
‘My life being the way it is and having three children, I have to be very organised,’ adds Keeley, who’s mother to Maggie, 14, and Ralph, 11, from her marriage to former Spooks co-star Matthew Macfadyen, and 18-year- old son Myles by her first husband, cartoonist Spencer McCallum. ‘I’m super-organised, my husband is too. It’s not like he’s scatty and I’m organised, we’re both similar in that way.’
In Traitors, Priscilla works under Clement Attlee, the new prime minister after his Labour Party won a shock landslide victory over Winston Churchill in 1945. Churchill’s defeat has sparked uneasy times in the special relationship between Britain and the USA as the allies jostle for supremacy in the new world order. One war is over, but the Cold War is just beginning, and Priscilla suspects one of her young underlings, Feef Symonds, played by newcomer Emma Appleton, is spying on the British government for America.
‘This is one of the trickiest shows ever to talk about because everybody has a secret,’ says Keeley. ‘Priscilla’s an under-secretary working for the prime minister and she and her colleagues are involved in government policy, the prime minister’s speeches and all that nitty gritty. So it’s quite a high-pressure, stressful job and she’s the only woman involved at that level which is the interesting thing. It’s very much a man’s world.’
Priscilla campaigns for her female colleagues’ rights, lobbying for the marriage bar – an unwritten rule that women should stop work after their wedding day – to be lifted within the government, even though she herself is unmarried and thus free to work. ‘She’s a champion of women’s rights and very modern in that way. She sees a bit of herself in Feef because she’s bright and Priscilla wants to champion her too,’ explains Keeley. ‘It’s such an interesting period. I didn’t know much about it, or I’d learnt it at school and forgotten it because it was years ago. The marriage bar, for example, I had no idea about – I had to Google it.
‘Women are being asked to go back to being housewives. They spent the war stepping up and being ambulance drivers and all the other things they did. Then suddenly they’re given the sack, it was terrible.
‘The war is over, but it must have been a very odd time and something of an anti- climax because the war was so dramatic – every day it was life or death. And suddenly you’re back to sort of nothing. And the really interesting thing, which again I didn’t know about, was this department that Priscilla works in had to create the new benefits system with a shortage of paper and pencils.’
The plot’s a nail-biter and the sets brilliantly evoke war-ravaged Britain. One spectacular scene shot in Cardiff features a street converted into a bomb site with burned-out and shattered buildings, the setting for an explosion involving a 1940s London bus. But on location today in a typical Victorian square in Islington (save for the fact that the grass has been left deliberately unkempt to give it that authentically shabby look), Keeley’s been filming a more tranquil scene with Michael Stuhl-
‘This is a tricky story to talk about; everyone has a secret’
barg, star of Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning film The Shape Of Water, who plays fanatical American secret agent Thomas Rowe.
‘I had my first and only scene today with Michael – he’s hot! I mean, in sort of career terms. Well, in every term obviously,’ she laughs. ‘ I loved every second of it. I tried to look professional, but he’s a huge star and he’s just so good. And he’s really lovely, charming, gracious and kind too.
‘I think we were very lucky to get him because he was riding high off the back of a mass of Oscar nominations for three films he was in that year.’ She’s referring to The Shape Of Water, Call Me By Your Name and The Post, which collected a total of five Oscars. ‘So when they said, “We’ve got Michael” everyone was thinking, “What?!” It was a thrilling moment when we got that news.’
Michael’s character Rowe steps in to direct Feef after she’s been seduced by rogue American spook Peter Mc C o rmi c k ( Matt Lauria) into spying on her own country to uncover a Russian agent at the heart of the British government. But meeting idealistic, newly elected MP Hugh Fenton ( Luke Treadaway) morally complicates things for Feef.
However Rowe, who has troubled American soldier Jackson Cole ( Brandon P Bell) working for him, is prepared to go to dangerous extremes to achieve his ends and Priscilla inevitably gets caught up in the fallout, although Feef will soon discover that Priscilla has secrets of her own.
Priscilla’s only release valve seems to be the deliciously camp Gilbert & Sullivan Society at Whitehall. ‘The singing is another side of these very grey people,’ says Keeley. ‘Priscilla’s been in a relationship with her colleague Philip, played by Stephen Campbell Moore, which she keeps very private, and they’re both in the Gilbert & Sullivan Society.
‘ When I read the script I was romping along in this spy thriller and suddenly they’re all singing. I thought, “Gosh, pages from another script must have got in here.” But actually it’s such a brilliant idea as that society really did exist and it was an outlet for them in this high-pressure job. We had a whole day where
Stephen and I had a duet, which was lovely and romantic. I sing solo, quite badly, at this show we put on for our co-workers. It’s a relief and a breath of fresh air.
‘I haven’t sung for years, and this is an operetta so it’s right up there. I can hold a tune but this is something else. So I said I’d love to do the job but that was the only thing that was making me feel a bit nervous. They said, “We’ll give you the option to sing, and if not we’ll get somebody else to sing it. So we went to record the solo and this American girl turned up. She sang it and they recorded her, and then I sang it and they said, “Actually, we’ll just use that.” So they’ve used me!’
Keeley’s happy to hand over the glamour in this series to her co-star, former model turned actor Emma, 27, as Feef. ‘She’s like a baby Audrey Tautou,’ laughs Keeley, 42. ‘That’s what she looks like. Every time I look at her she’s Amelie to me.’
Feef was born into an aristocratic family but she’s been disenchanted by the expectations of her dominating parents, to be a good little girl and get married. She joins the civil service longing for adventure, but when it’s not forthcoming, her disappointment and her social class make her an easy target for recruitment by US agents Peter McCormick and Thomas Rowe to spy for America on Britain’s new Socialist government.
‘Feef is very naive in terms of how the world works,’ explains Emma. ‘She goes into this thinking it’s the good guys fighting against the bad guys, but over the course of it she realises that there’s no such thing. Feef sees Priscilla as a sort of alternative mother figure in the end because she motivates her and validates her. She sees a lot of herself in Priscilla, and Priscilla is everything she admires and respects.’
Emma took deportment lessons for the role, and had plenty of action scenes. ‘I didn’t realise quite how physically demanding it was going to be. It’s very different when you read something in a script from when you’re there, actually doing it. Like when I had to go swimming naked at night in a freezing-cold lake in Wales. It was only for ten minutes but it seemed like a lifetime as I was trying not to panic.’
Feef’s youthful verve and chutzpah are enough to impress the hard-bitten Rowe. ‘She has a different perspective on things that he doesn’t have, which delights and surprises him and takes him aback a bit because she’s so young,’ explains Michael Stuhlbarg, whose character is based on Frank Wisner, head of the Office of Strategic Services in south-eastern Europe at the end of the war. ‘She’s never done anything like this before, but he thinks he’s found his own particular niche. Then this young girl comes along and she can do things he can’t, which he really respects.
‘ Rowe trains OSS agents. He thinks it’s essential that America has an operational intelligence agency to compete with all the other countries that have them, particularly the Russians, who have infiltrated all over Europe. His motto is, “Whatever it takes.” Basically, that’s how he lives his life, he’ll do whatever it takes to get the job done even if it means lying, cheating, stealing and committing murder. It all makes for a really gripping drama.’
‘I’m a perfectionist like my character’
Traitors begins tomorrow at 9pm on Channel 4.