Hewson returns to Irish roots in ‘Bad Sisters’
Reading script for show ‘lightning-bolt situation’ for actor
One afternoon in September, Eve Hewson was in Washington Square Park in New York, retracing the steps of her past.
Raised outside Dublin, Hewson came to New York 12 years ago and enrolled at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with the singular goal of making it as an actor. Her parents had only allowed her to apply to one drama school, and she made the cut.
“Now I look back on it, and I’m like ‘What … was I thinking?’ But when you’re 17, you’re like, ‘This is my one true dream. I’m not gonna have a plan B.’ I had no other skills!” she says, her Irish brogue rising an octave in disbelief.
Hewson’s youthful chutzpah may now strike her as reckless, but it served her well.
The 31-year-old has been working steadily for more than a decade, starring alongside the likes of James Gandolfini (in “Enough Said”) and Sean Penn (in Paolo Sorrentino’s “This Must Be the Place”) before she had even completed her studies. Straight out of school, she landed in Steven Soderbergh’s visceral medical drama, “The Knick,” followed by Steven Spielberg’s Cold War saga, “Bridge of Spies.”
After a pair of highprofile leading roles last year — as a posh London housewife in the trippy psychological thriller “Behind Her Eyes” and as a mysterious pioneer in the period piece “The Luminaries” — Hewson has returned to her Irish roots with “Bad Sisters,” which recently concluded its first season on Apple TV+.
Created by Sharon Horgan, the darkly comic murder mystery follows a tight-knit clan of Irish sisters who hatch a plot to kill their despicable but annoyingly resilient brother-in-law. Hewson plays Becka, the youngest of the five Garvey sisters, a free-spirited massage therapist whose ill-advised romance with a cute insurance agent (Daryl McCormack) threatens to blow up their entire scheme.
Blending humor and trauma in a way that feels distinctly Irish — even if it’s adapted from a Belgian series — “Bad Sisters” leverages Hewson’s agility as a performer in a way that few projects have to date.
Whether she is especially motivated to build her own reputation as an artist or simply has good taste, Hewson has gravitated to bold projects like “The Knick,” a gripping period piece set in a Manhattan hospital in the early 1900s.
In her first TV role, she played Lucy, a seemingly wide-eyed nurse from West Virginia who becomes romantically entangled with Clive Owen’s character, Dr. John Thackery, a brilliant, drug-addicted surgeon.
Despite the edginess of the material, Hewson says she felt very safe in Soderbergh’s hands: “It was the perfect place for me to stretch my little wings.”
But Hewson suspects that working in such a sensitive, supportive environment so early in her career also set her up for disappointment later on.
Or, as she puts it, “I was absolutely spoiled rotten. It took me years to recover. On every other set, it just wasn’t the same.”
After a particularly demoralizing experience on a movie she won’t name — “it’s not hard to look up” — she considered quitting the business entirely.
“There was a lot of focus on what my body looked like and how I wasn’t sexy enough or attractive enough and how we had to make my character more sexually aggressive. I had never experienced anything on that scale of misogyny and disrespect. It was really tough, especially coming from working with brilliant directors like Spielberg and Soderbergh and Sorrentino, who just never spoke to me in that way. That experience broke my confidence.”
Therapy helped her move on. So did making “The Luminaries” for six months on location in New Zealand. In the BBC/Starz series, set in the antipodean frontier in the 1860s and adapted from Eleanor Catton’s sprawling novel, she plays a woman who travels to the country’s wild South Island, where she is trafficked into sex work and endures repeated brutality. “I was in a corset and a crinoline, covered in mud, chained to a ( jail) cell, sweating, and I would come home with bruises all over me. It was like, either go hard or go home,” she says, “and I went hard.”
Hewson followed “The Luminaries” with “Behind Her Eyes,” a sexually charged thriller with a twist ending so mind-bendingly out-there that it inspired a cottage industry of explainers. Hewson had “a riot of a time” making the series because, she says, a devilish glint in her eye, “It’s more fun to play a lie.”
When Hewson read the script for “Bad Sisters,” it was “a lightning-bolt situation, like I found the thing I always knew I could do.” At the time, Hewson was also mulling a high-profile project “my agents would have loved me to do,” she says. So Horgan wrote her a letter, telling her all the reasons she had to play Becka. Hewson didn’t need much convincing: “I just knew if anybody else ever played her, I would be devastated.”
“I think she’s an absolute revelation,” says Horgan, who plays eldest sister Eva in the series and praises Hewson’s discipline. “(She’s) great craic when we’re having fun, but when she’s focused, she’s very focused.”
The role enabled
Hewson to explore a full spectrum of emotions, playing moments of meetcute screwball romance alongside gut-wrenching tragedy.
“Becka was the most me I’ve ever put out there,” she says. While this is true in a literal sense — scenes of Becka and her sisters swimming in the Irish Sea were filmed minutes down the road from Hewson’s family home — she also related to the messy humanity of the Garvey clan.
“There is something different about characters that are written by women,” she says. “In this (show) there’s middle-aged women, infertile women, angry one-eyed lesbians.
All of the things that Hollywood says are not interesting, and yet I think are the most sexy, the most thrilling, the most exciting group of women that I’ve seen in a while.”
It was exhilarating, if also exhausting, “to live in between comedy and drama,” says Hewson. “The girls” — she means her co-stars — “called it ‘straddling’: one foot’s in drama, and you’re just riding it.”
Up next is “Flora and Her Son,” from “Once” filmmaker John Carney. It’s a musical — “the one thing I thought I would never do, because I can’t sing,” says Hewson, whose love of a challenge outweighs her self-doubt. “… You go, ‘I have no creative bone in my body, I’ve no original thought. Why did they cast me?’ The fear is immense. But the high after achieving it is worth it.”