Scent of Success
Keeley Hawes smells, but not of cigarette smoke despite her chain-smoking throughout our interview.
No. Today, despite the nicotine-stained atmosphere, Ms Hawes smells so good you could eat her.
“Thanks,” she blushes, when I enquire. “It’s a perfume called Angel.”
Which is a bit ironic really, because these days Keeley is earning a living being anything but angelic.
The 26-year-old actress, who starred as Dessie alongside Christopher Eccleston and Eamonn Walker in last year’s ITV adaptation of Othello, is currently sporting a close-cut hairdo.
It’s an occupational necessity for her current role as an 19th century male impersonator in BBC1’s autumn drama Tipping The Velvet, with Rachael Stirling and Anna Chancellor.
Oh, and just one other minor detail — her character also happens to be a lesbian, in what has been described by BBC insiders as a “full-on lesbo romp”. Good grief.
“That’s the first thing everyone asks me about just now,” she giggles. “Oddly enough, now that I come to think about it, that’s the first thing people in the street ask me about, too.”
She’s joking, of course, but the day isn’t far away when Keeley Hawes will be getting stopped by people in the street.
Having made her breakthrough in Dennis Potter’s raunchy Karaoke as an 18-year-old, she’s gone on to appear in Wives and Daughters and Murder in Mind before landing the part in Othello.
Her profile will soar after her appearance in forthcoming BBC1 MI5 drama, Spooks, and you can bet your best bunnett she’ll be a face long remembered after Tipping the Velvet.
“I was rehearsing a song called Where’s My Little Willy this morning, which was all very nice,” she says between drags of her first ciggie.
“I’ve not really filmed much by way of difficult scenes yet.”
Keeley married her cartoonist husband Spencer in December, and, she insists, he hasn’t said much about the fact that his wife is indulging in some girl-on-girl action so soon after getting hitched.
“I haven’t really gone into it with him yet to be honest,” she says with a smile that reveals a string of perfectly straight pearl-white teeth, despite the cigarettes.
“I could just see me coming back and saying, ‘Hmm, yes darling, work was rather nice today, and… er… I’m not coming home again’.”
What about her poor parents?
“My folks have been very good about it, but in the past I’ve done some pretty extreme stuff, like Karaoke. I think they accept it really, they sort of find it interesting and intriguing.
“In saying that, my mum will probably down a couple of bottles of wine before watching it,” she says, tongue firmly in cheek.
Her current outing in high-octane MI5 drama Spooks, however, might leave a fair few shaken, if not stirred.
Keeley plays Zoe, an MI5 agent, hot on the trail of the country’s fiercest terrorists. But it’s not a job she would particularly want in real life.
“People think it’s glamorous, but I wouldn’t say so,” she says. “It’s not very well paid, and you have to lead a double life.
“The character played by Matthew Macfadyen meets a girl, but he can’t tell her his real name, or anything about his life. That’s the way it is.”
Clandestine existence apart, spies literally have to get their hands dirty, as Keeley discovered.
“I have a scene up on Hampstead Heath, where I have to bend down and pick up a fake dog poo, which has a drawer in it,” she says. “Inside the drawer there’s a message, saying something like, ‘Meet me in the pub’.
“These are the kind of things they have to do, and I’m sure there must be times when they pick up the wrong one. Thankfully that didn’t happen to me.”
So no unpleasant smell there, then. By now, though, Keeley is on to her fourth fag. The girl is chain-smoking.
“I am smoking quite a lot, aren’t I?” she agrees, as her ciggie smoke drifts into my eyes, while assuring me that it’s got nothing to do with nerves.
“I don’t smoke around my baby Myles,” she says. “And I didn’t smoke when I was pregnant. The smell would have been enough to make me sick.”
So what about the booze?
“Well, I was at the BAFTAs last week for Othello, and I tried to get drunk, but hours later I was still sober and wanted to go home,” she says.
“It was a long night. I’d never been along to one of those things before, and, to be honest I found it really quite tedious.”
Dining with a room full of the country’s best actors, sipping champagne, clapping, laughing and dancing the night away might not seem much like tedium to you and me.
But then Keeley’s job happens to be more exciting than your average nine-to-fiver’s. For instance, when was the last time you went down to the pub for a pint and packet of pork scratchings with a bunch of ex-KGB and MI5 men?
“It made me feel extremely uninteresting really.” Ah well – maybe not so exciting, then?
“They were very open in talking about things, and very clever. Sometimes they were quite guarded. It was a really strange experience.
“One of them told me a story about when he’d been working undercover in Afghanistan in the early ’80s.
“A friend of his was shot, and he’d had to carry this guy 40km across the mountains. It such a bizarre job.”
Playing at James Bond is still a favourite playground past-time in primary schools across the country, and often the spy fantasy doesn’t fade as boys become men.
Witness our love of gadgets, quirky cars and sharp suits.
It’s something that those net nerds down at the BBC have tapped into, with a Spooks interactive website to satisfy the fantasy of all those wee boys trapped in men’s bodies.
The idea is that we can play at being MI5 agents online, signing up for vetting and training for access to a fictional world set within the UK’s domestic intelligence service.
Online agents can examine files, leave and receive messages, call for surveillance of suspicious targets and get fresh orders from cast members. At the end of the day, it’s really just a big computer game.
But for those civil servants out there who protect us from the threat of terrorism — especially post September 11 — it’s a far cry from Bond babes and vodka Martinis.
“One ex-spy was telling me that sometimes they’d have all their old friends round from MI5 or whatever, and tell their stories. Even their wives wouldn’t believe some of what they had got up to,” says Keeley.
“But they’re really ordinary people. You wouldn’t look at them twice, but that’s the point, I suppose.”
You might look twice at Keeley, though, despite the fact that her agent apparently described her as “having the face of a boy, and the body of a woman”. Perfect for Tipping the Velvet then, some might say.
Keeley used to be a model, although she thought it was tedious, and reckons that she was never really cut out for it anyway.
But there’s no denying that up close she’s a babe — even through the fumes.
So much so that her own son confuses her for Hollywood’s number one actress.
“He points at pictures in magazines of people and says: ‘Mama?'”
“I’m like: ‘Aww, thank you dear but, no, that’s Julia Roberts.”
Only in most 26-year-old British actresses’ dreams are they mistaken for the widest mouth in Hollywood.
But as far as this one is concerned, you can keep your swanky parties, big dresses and Hollywood contracts.
“Nah, I don’t want to work abroad,” says Keeley, sparking up another cigarette. “I don’t like the fags anywhere else.”
bbc.co.uk/spooks. Spooks, BBC1, May 13, 9.00pm
By Paul English for The Daily Record.
(Source: The Free Library)