The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I’m proud to be a working-class actress’
Eve Myles, star of hit Welsh drama ‘Keeping Faith’ , tells Chris Harvey why success is not the same as happiness
When Keeping Faith,a low-budget, made-forWelsh-television drama, became an unexpected smash on BBC One last summer, one performance stood out. Eve Myles, as a lawyer and mother of three, whose husband has suddenly, inexplicably, vanished, was bursting from the screen – gutsy, warm, human, believable. Myles had been on our televisions for two decades, but more than a few viewers were asking themselves: why hadn’t they noticed her before?
Some had. As long ago as 2004, while in the RSC, Myles won an Ian Charleson Award for the best classical stage performance by an actor under 30. Russell T Davies described her as “Wales’s best kept secret” after he cast her in the first series of his rebooted Doctor Who in 2005, then wrote her character into the spin-off series Torchwood as a co-lead. Myles also appeared last year in his adaptation of A Very English Scandal, as the real-life Welsh widow who became involved with Jeremy Thorpe’s lover Norman Scott. (“Eve Myles walked off with the few scenes she was in as Gwen Parry-Jones,” The Telegraph noted.) She was excellent, too, in Lucy Gannon’s 2013 drama about a district nurse, Frankie, and in the third series of Broadchurch two years later.
Yet before Keeping Faith came along, Myles was thinking of giving up acting altogether – and becoming a midwife. She calls it a career “wobble”, her response to not feeling challenged by the roles she was being offered. “I’ve talked to a lot of actors about this, and a lot of very successful actors,” she says. “Just because you’re successful doesn’t mean that you’re happy. It’s about what parts you play, that’s what makes you a wealthy actor. It’s the work you do, not the money.”
Myles has made her home in Cardiff, where she lives with husband Bradley Freegard (also an actor, who plays her missing spouse in Keeping Faith), and their two daughters, Matilda, nine, and Siena, five. It’s there I
find her, after making my way through the covered market and past the gothic pinnacles of the church of St John the Baptist. “On the way back, you have to get the famous cockles in Cardiff market,” she tells me. “They’re gorgeous. People come from far and wide for them, and the laver bread.”
There’s a down-to-earthiness about Myles, who grew up in the town of Ystradgynlais (population 8,092) on the edge of the Brecon Beacons. Until the age of nine, she lived in a council flat. Her Glaswegian father and Welsh mother – “they’re very colourful people” – had separated, but she remains close to both.
She was an imaginative child. As a teenager, she attended the Welsh National Youth Theatre, and still feels grateful to those who helped her raise what seemed the impossibly large sum of £700 to get there. She once fretted about being pigeonholed as a workingclass actress, but now, she tells me, “I’m incredibly proud to be a working-class actress… I know what my roots are.”
Her character in Keeping Faith, though, is a successful middleclass professional, and the drama is shot in a way that makes much of her power-dressing. Does Myles think that powerful women should have to wear heels? “I think that you should wear whatever makes you feel confident,” she says, “and never allow anyone to tell you any different. Personally, if I never saw another heel in my life, I’d be very happy.” (Today, she’s wearing a glamorous dress with trainers.)
What of the yellow raincoat that became Keeping Faith’s equivalent of Sarah Lund’s famous sweater in The Killing – has Myles ever been identified with a piece of clothing? “My pyjamas,” she laughs. “As soon as I get in from work, they’re my go-to… I am the most unglamorous woman in the world.”
We talk about Keeping Faith’s remarkable success. It was filmed in two languages, and had already aired on Welsh channel S4C in Welsh, as Un Bore Mercher, when it appeared on BBC Wales in English in early 2018, before finding a home on iPlayer. By May, after eight-and-a-half million downloads, the decision was made to broadcast it on BBC One, where it was seen by more than four million viewers.
Myles actually turned down the role of Faith four times – on the grounds that she didn’t talk Welsh. It was something “I genuinely believed I couldn’t do. And I decided, well, there’s no greater challenge, so that’s what I did.”
With the help of her Welshspeaking husband, she became so fluent that she was recently able to converse with a stranger for 10 minutes, she says. When it came to the second series, however, she realised that the script was full of long, emotional scenes.
It was “terrifying beyond belief ”, she says, “but the only thing you can do is work your b------- off. There are not enough hours in the day that you can put into prep. I