Keeley Hawes
Mutual Friends 9pm Tuesday BBC1
Mutual Friends is billed as a comedy, but in its opening scenes the new six-part series starring Keeley Hawes, Marc Warren and Alexander Armstrong, isn’t exactly a laugh a minute. We see Carl, a middle-aged father of three, saying goodbye to his wife and children, picking up his briefcase and going to work. On arriving at the railway station, he calmly walks on to the platform and steps out in front of a train.
“The humour is certainly subtle,” agrees Hawes. “It’s a comedy drama where the drama comes first, which is exactly why I like it. It treats the audience intelligently and presents a very real view of life and relationships. When I first read the script, I was doing Macbeth and it was a real tonic. It was just the sort of thing I would want to watch myself.”
The series deals with the aftermath of Carl’s death. Hawes plays Jen Grantham, the dissatisfied wife of Martin (Marc Warren), who was Carl’s best friend. Shortly after the funeral, Jen reveals to Martin that she slept with Carl twice. Martin’s life swiftly spirals out of control as he is threatened with divorce, gets the cold shoulder from his young son, and comes close to losing his job. At the same time, he becomes reacquainted with an old friend, the feckless womaniser Patrick (Alexander Armstrong), whose efforts to take Martin’s mind off his troubles land them both in hot water.
The part of Jen is the latest in a series of eclectic roles for Hawes who, in recent years, has been seen as a lesbian music-hall entertainer in Tipping the Velvet, an MI5 agent in Spooks and a leggy retro-cop in Ashes to Ashes.
“Looking back, there hasn’t been much rhyme or reason to the roles I’ve played,” she says. “Unless you’re Angelina Jolie, you just take the best of the work that’s offered to you, and I’ve been very fortunate not to be pigeonholed. If I’m honest, I’m not particularly ambitious, I’ve just been lucky with what’s come my way.”
Hawes attributes this lack of ambition to her busy family life — she has three children, two of them with her husband, the actor Matthew Macfadyen — and the fact that she never chose to become an actor in the first place. “Ever since my first job on (Dennis Potter’s) Karaoke when I was 19, my career has kind of happened to me rather than me chasing it. I can be very driven and I get excited about jobs, but it’s not the only thing that gets me up in the morning.”
By Fiona Sturgess for The Independent on Sunday.
(Source: highbeam.com)