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My dad Bono’s like a crazy stage mum!
Her famous father didn’t want her to act, but as she stars in a dark Netflix thriller, Eve Hewson says he’s finally come round...
You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a romantic comedy. Louise, a pretty, funny single mother, goes to meet a girlfriend at a trendy London bar. The friend doesn’t show up, and as Louise is standing to leave she performs the classic rom-com trick of spilling a drink over a tall, handsome stranger. Mortified, she insists on buying him a replacement, and over conversation attraction blossoms.
At the end of the evening with both of them tipsy, he breaks off from a clinch and bolts. Of course, in true romantic comedy fashion, they meet the very next day – she’s a secretary in a psychiatrist’s office and he’s the recently hired doctor, David Ferguson, who’ll be her new boss.
But things soon turn darker in Behind Her Eyes, a new miniseries on Netflix. David, it turns out, is married to beautiful, elegant Adele, though the marriage is troubled and there are veiled references to something in their past that made them up sticks from Scotland to London. Louise, meanwhile, is lonely and struggling to raise her son Adam, and plagued by nightmares that leave her sleepwalking to the edge of the balcony of her high-rise flat. When down-to-earth Louise and highly strung Adele form an unlikely friendship, the lives of all three take a sinister turn.
Eve Hewson, the daughter of U2’s Bono who first found fame in 2014 as nurse Lucy Elkins in dark hospital drama The Knick and starred as adventurer Anna Wetherell in last year’s The Luminaries, says playing Adele was emotionally draining.
‘She was interesting because she does things we all wish we could do but would never let ourselves do in real life. She gets angry quickly, and to prepare for those scenes I’d smash a pillow with a bat to get in that mindset.’
Adele is also a drug addict. ‘Heroin is a theme of my career!’ smiles Eve, 29. ‘I’ve had a lot of experience injecting fake syringes, and on The Knick we had someone advise us where in their bodies addicts injected and why; sometimes they even turned to injecting into their eyeballs. It was a desperate state to be in.’
Simona Brown, who appeared as Grace in The Night Manager, is cast as Louise while Vanity Fair’s Tom Bateman plays David, and Eve says it was the nail-biting material that made the three actors bond off-screen. ‘It was an intense
shoot. Tom and I got really close, and Simona and I needed to as well as this is a story about a love triangle, but female friendship is important too. There’s a lot of love between Adele and Louise.’
She says it’s just as well she and Tom became friends as one love scene in particular was very steamy. ‘That’s what it looks from the outside anyway, but it really wasn’t whenwewere doing it,’ she laughs. ‘I’ve done a lot of sex scenes, and you just hope your partner is someone you get on with. We were comfortable with each other so it was all OK.’
To facilitate the proceedings, the studio used intimacy coach Ita O’brien, famous for choreographing the sex scenes on Normal People. ‘She was actually working on Normal People at the same time,’ says Eve. ‘I thought her work on that was beautiful.’
Born in Dublin (her full name is Memphis Eve Sunny Day Hewson – the Eve part came about because she was born at 7am on 7 July and Eve is the middle three letters of
‘seven’), she was raised with her three siblings by Bono and his activist and businesswoman wife Ali. Although her parents were against her becoming an actor, she made her debut in her early teens in the short film Lost And Found, then studied drama in New York. She says her parents have finally accepted her choice of profession. ‘My dad’s like a crazy stage mum!’ she laughs. ‘Whenever we’re out he’s always introducing me as his daughter the actress and talking about my career. My mum’s supportive and encouraging too, so that’s really nice.’
Eve has spent the pandemic alternating between her family in Ireland and her flat in London. Currently single, she says her evenings now consist of ‘a bottle of wine with my cat and Netflix’.
She grew up with terrible nightmares and is interested in interpreting her dreams. ‘I think the nightmares are what sparked my imagination. I’m still into dreaming; when I wake up I look them up on the internet to see what they mean. I still have nightmares – I had one about Hugh Grant last night after watching The Undoing. I’m not sure what that means!’
‘Heroin has been a theme of my career’