I don’t think depression ever goes away
From police dramas to children’s tales, Keeley Hawes is in demand – but life hasn’t always been so sweet, says Matthew Stadlen
There’s nothing like being in demand. But when you’re an actress about to hit 40, you could be forgiven for feeling particularly chuffed at still being a hot property. If the likes of Juliet Stevenson and Zoe Wanamaker are to be believed, the acting world isn’t always kind to women as they move beyond the traditional confines of the romantic lead. Yet Keeley Hawes – star of Line of
Duty , Ashes to Ashes and Doctor Who , and still some way off middle age herself – is determined to paint a rather different picture of life as a woman on our screens.
“It’s starting to not really ring true,” she says of the suggestion that women are under-represented in British television drama. “Quite often, there’s a woman not only at the forefront, but also the supporting cast is full of women being brilliant as well.” Although she accepts there’s still a long way to go, she’d prefer to accentuate the positives. “It is changing and it’s great and we should celebrate what there is.”
There’s undoubtedly a lot for Hawes to celebrate as she approaches her 40th birthday in February. She recently tried her hand at Shakespeare for the first time, playing Queen Elizabeth in a second series of
The Hollow Crown , BBC Two’s miniseries adaptations of the History Plays, due for broadcast in the spring, in which she appears alongside Benedict Cumberbatch and Dame Judi Dench (“she’s just heaven…”).
However, Hawes admits that Shakespeare was like learning another language. “I didn’t want to do it initially,” she says. “I shied away. It was absolutely terrifying…”
I sense a “But…”, and then she adds: “I’m being asked to do things which really blow my hair back and make me scared. People are trusting me with different roles – and it’s working.”
Tonight, Hawes can be seen playing alongside other actorly national treasures, this time with Timothy Spall and Victoria Wood, in the Sky One adaptation of Raymond Briggs’s children’s classic, Fungus the
Bogeyman . Filming the three-part series – in which disgusting green ogres live in a parallel underground world to the suburban life of Hawes’s character – was “completely bonkers… one of the craziest things I’ve ever done!”, but great fun: “Good, old-fashioned farty fun.”
We grab a quick lunch during filming of The Durrells , a six-part series for ITV set mostly in Corfu, but for which some scenes are being shot on a dank winter’s day in Surrey.
It’s a big-money production, and while filming on location abroad she would fly back at weekends to see Matthew Macfadyen, her actor husband, and their three children. “People think it’s glamorous,” she says, giggling, as she eats her lunch in the location food truck, a converted double-decker. “This is it! You come here in the dark, you have your dinner on a bus, you work in a dressing gown [to keep her warm and protect her costume] and then you go home in the dark.”
That said, Hawes is happy to extol the virtues of working in television, which, after all, is where she’s made her name. Not for her the prioritising of the older, arguably more raw art of theatre.
“I love going to work, I absolutely love it. I particularly love television because sometimes we shoot 10 pages [of the script] a day and sometimes two, but every day is different. Whereas with film, everything takes a lot longer. With the stage, everything’s a lot more monotonous after a while. Television really keeps it interesting.”
Hawes punctuates much of what she says with a disarming laugh, accompanied with a modest dipping of her gaze. Times haven’t always been this good for her, and although she no longer suffers so much from depression and anxiety, they haven’t entirely dissipated. She first experienced symptoms when she was 17, and she thinks she can recognise the signs now. “I don’t think it ever goes away. The fear is that it’s always just behind you. If you let your guard down for a minute, that’s when it’ll come and bite you on the ----. You are always aware, because it’s so horrendous, that you never want to go back to that place if there’s anything you can do about it.”
Hawes has been
‘I don’t think it ever goes away – the fear is it’s always just behind you’
married to Macfadyen for more than a decade. They have a son and a daughter together and a son from her first marriage to the cartoonist Spencer McCallum, with whom she remains very good friends. It’s rare that hers and Macfadyen’s work schedules overlap, which, given the 14-hour working days, is just as well: she admits to being “quite proud” that, at home, there’s no need for the help they once, briefly, employed.
Theirs is a “normal” life, she insists. Normal-ish, anyway; it’s not every couple that stars in films together – “I love working with him. I always feel relaxed. He’s a bit of a giggler but I’m a bit of a giggler” – and when one of them has a particularly big part on the horizon, they can help each other with the lines.
If it sounds like a relationship of equals, life in the kitchen is a different story. There was no question who would be in charge of Christmas dinner. “He’s a very good cook,” says Hawes of her husband. “He’s the ruler of our kitchen. He’d say that I’m fine, but I never really get a chance because he really enjoys it, and I don’t, really. So it tends to be me doing the decorating and him doing the cooking.”
Hawes grew up “very happily” in a Marylebone council flat, the youngest of four children. Her father was a black cab driver and one of her brothers still is. She studied at Sylvia Young Theatre School – “for somebody from my family, it was a very unusual thing to do” – and appeared in a number of commercials and children’s TV drama series from the age of nine. She didn’t, she insists, have “specific” elocution lessons. “I wasn’t from the East End of London, I never had a Cockney accent, but I suppose there were some things that were ironed out.”
She left school at 16, but has no regrets that university passed her by. “None whatsoever. God, I was having the time of my life,” she says. After a stint as a model, her big break arrived in the mid-Nineties, in the shape of Dennis Potter’s final TV drama series,
Karaoke , which starred Albert Finney, Roy Hudd and Julie Christie (“I never looked back, really”).
A quick internet search reveals photos of Hawes scantily dressed, but she isn’t one for career regrets. There are decisions she made when she was much younger that perhaps she would not make now, and even today’s choices she accepts might one day cause her to ask: “Why the hell did I do that?”
“But there’s not a single day of anything I’ve done that I regret because everything has ultimately led me to where I am now,” she says. “And I’m incredibly happy. I’ve learnt along the way from people good and bad.”
Fungus the Bogeyman begins tonight on
Sky1, 6pm