Bodyguard, Line Of Duty, The Durrells and now the highly anticipated Scoop – she’s the muse of modern TV. Stylist’s Lisa Smosarski meets the magnetic Keeley Hawes…
PHOTOGRAPHY: JONTY DAVIES FASHION: LUCY REBER
Keeley Hawes is dripping in colour. Primary colours at that. She’s head to toe in the kind of shades that remind you of gloopy pots of paint in a children’s nursery. Bright royal blues, vivacious reds and a yellow that practically yells summer; it’s a far cry from the period costumes and police uniforms that we’ve come to know from one of Britain’s most popular small-screen heroes. “Oh, it’s really not me,” Hawes laughs. “This is about as crazy as I get,” she says, pointing at the grey jumper and quiet-luxe cream corduroy joggers she normally wears. “Primary colours are not for me. I love and appreciate fashion, but I’ve just got a thing for grey jumpers and black coats. It’s good to be pushed out of my comfort zone, though.”
That creative bravery and tolerance of the discomfort zone is something that Hawes has been embracing a lot in recent months – from her eight-week run on stage at the Donmar Warehouse in London for The Human Body, a new play that charts the origins of the NHS via the lens of a midlife romance (“It’s probably been one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever undertaken,” admits Hawes. “It feels huge but I’m winning.”), to tackling big, biopic roles on screen. The most recent of these sees her play Amanda Thirsk, a former royal aide, in Netflix’s Scoop, a fictionalised retelling of the story behind the now famous BBC Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. The 2019 interview, led by Emily Maitlis and booked by journalist Samantha McAlister, was agreed by Thirsk as a way of setting the record straight about Andrew’s connection to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The interview backfired and is largely credited with being the catalyst for Andrew’s withdrawal from public life.
“I’ve played a few real people, living and no longer with us, and there is a responsibility with those roles,” Hawes says. “Nobody wants to do a hatchet job, and having spoken to Sam [McAlister], she was keen that it was a sympathetic version of Amanda, a person she was close to. And I think that’s what’s been achieved.”
As Thirsk, Hawes stars alongside Gillian Anderson (Maitlis), Billie Piper (McAlister) and Romola Garai as Esmé Wren
