Making one giant leap for womankind

Hannah Ware is reaching for the stars as a female space scientist in Channel 4’s new drama, she tells Samuel Fishwick

WHEN Hannah Ware looks up at the stars she takes comfort in knowing that her own feet are on the ground. “I don’t think I’d make a very good astronaut,” says the actor, 35, whose younger sister is the singer Jessie Ware. “It makes me feel a bit queasy. Partly because I was so bad at science when I was at school. I’m happy to keep the stars where they are, rather than hurtle towards them.”

It’s a concept that Ware has had to get to grips with: she plays the scientist Sadie Hewitt in Channel 4’s new space drama The First, which imagines pioneering Mars colonists in 2030.

It’s a not too different present-future, save for the apparent prevalence of voice-activated electric cars and the still-ageless chops of Sean Penn, in character as the world-weary astronaut Tom Hagerty, the 13th person to set foot on the moon. “Sean’s the nicest man, with that rare sort of boundless energy and affability,” says Ware.

That helped her settle in to this brave new world — as did a rigorous research schedule: visits to the SpaceX launch sites, nights spent scrolling TED talks to revise on her GCSE physics classes, and meetings with Nasa astronauts Sandy Magnus and Jessica Meir. In short, she brushed up — stopping just sort of a Nasa centrifuge.

It’s the depth and humanity of The First that excited her. Hewitt doesn’t want to have children but her character’s partner in the show, Ollie (Patrick Kennedy), does; meanwhile, she falls for fellow astronaut Nick Fletcher (James Ransone, Ziggy from The Wire). For a dead planet, there’s plenty of atmosphere here.

“I didn’t get into acting to play diminished women,” says Ware. “I’m not in this career to represent two-dimensional women, or the kind of women who are just there to be the object of men’s affections. I turn down scripts like that as a matter of principle.” She joins her co-star Natascha McElhone in lauding the “bravery” of the series’s creator and show-runner, Beau Willimon (formerly House of Cards), in creating female characters who are “both awkward and off-centre”.

“You need to be able to see yourself in fiction,” says Ware. “There’s that quotation — we read to know that we are not alone in the world. The same is true of television.”

The sky may be the limit for Ware’s own galactic ambitions but she’s travelled vast distances to get this far in her career. She grew up in Clapham, went to Alleyn’s School in Dulwich — and if she were ever cajoled to a Mars-bound spaceship, it would be a wrench to leave behind her family: Jessie, her younger brother Alex, a doctor, her father, the investigative journalist John Ware and