U 2 are a star!
Bono’s girl lands lead role in BBC drama ...after he told her not to be an actress
‘I really needed to escape’
WITH or without her famous father’s blessing, she was determined to be an actress.
Now, after several roles in films and on US television, Eve Hewson has landed her first leading part in a British drama.
The daughter of U2 frontman Bono stars in BBC1’s new Sunday night series The Luminaries.
She plays Anna Wetherell in the six-part drama, set on New Zealand’s South Island during the goldrush of the 1860s.
But fans of Eleanor Catton’s 2013 Booker Prize-winning novel, on which the series is based, may be puzzled as Anna, a prostitute, makes only a brief appearance in it.
However Miss Catton has rewritten the part for her TV adaptation, which also stars former Bond girl Eva Green and ex-EastEnders actor Himesh Patel.
‘Anna Wetherell isn’t a prominent character within the book, in fact she’s hardly mentioned,’ said Miss Hewson, 28.
‘But in the screenplay, Eleanor has addressed those characters from a distance and has chosen to retell the story through Anna’s perspective.
‘I thought that was really smart and interesting. Fans of the book can have a new take on their beloved story so it’s not just a direct, “live action” version of their imagination. It’s something different that I think the fans will find exciting.’
The story follows Anna, who falls for Emery Staines, played by Patel, 29, on a sea journey. They are separated and while trying to find each other become embroiled in a murder trial. Miss Green plays a brothel madam.
Miss Hewson – whose full name is Memphis Eve Sunny Day Hewson – has told how her parents were wary of her following them into the entertainment industry and warned her when she was a teenager of the perils awaiting young actresses.
Her father Bono, 60 – real name Paul Hewson – and mother Ali, 59, an activist and documentary maker, failed to deter her and she studied at the New York Film Academy.
Miss Hewson, who has posted pictures from her childhood on Instagram and who is in lockdown with her parents in Dublin, told Radio 2’s Zoe Ball Breakfast Show yesterday: ‘They definitely tried to steer me away from acting. Most parents want their kids to be doctors, lawyers, architects – something useful.’
The Irish actress landed her first major role in the 2011 film This Must
Be The Place, starring Sean Penn and Frances McDormand, and achieved wider notice in Steven Soderbergh’s 2014 hospital-set TV series The Knick, which also starred Clive Owen.
It 2015 she appeared alongside Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance in Steven Spielberg’s drama Bridge Of Spies and her latest film, Tesla, about the inventor Nikola Tesla, is due for release in August.
Having starred in the 2018 Hollywood flop Robin Hood, Miss Hewson had contemplated a break from acting before accepting the part of Anna in The Luminaries, she revealed last week.
‘I was at a point in my life where I really needed to escape,’ she told the Times. ‘For a little while I didn’t really know if I wanted to continue acting. I had had some experiences in my life that made me think maybe it wasn’t for me.’
The Luminaries begins on BBC1 on Sunday at 9pm, with part two on Monday. It will also be on iPlayer.