Keeley Hawes: Detecting a rise from the Ashes
The human whirlwind and acclaimed actress talks to Metro about leaving the 1980s for an altogether more modern phenomenon in Identity.
‘It’s very nice to be out of the 1980s,’ gushes breathless Ashes to Ashes star Keeley Hawes, having dashed in spectacularly late for our interview with an ‘it’s all a bit whoa!’ thanks to a poorly daughter and a traffic-halting parade at Hyde Park. ‘But everybody else has gone into the 1980s, in terms of programmes being made and what people are wearing.’
She points out the beige pegged trousers she’s currently sporting are identical to ones she wore for an episode of the time-warp cop show and are now available in Whistles.
‘Ashes to Ashes is a victim of its own success. We started lots of trends. I like to think we had something to do with bringing back the high waist. It’s so much more flattering. In the first series, sales of home-perm kits went up by 100 per cent or something ridiculous. Blue eyeliner. Through the roof at Boots.’
The human whirlwind that is Hawes may still be feeling the impact of the cult TV show she has just left behind but we’re here to talk about her next one, Identity, which is more serious and intense and very much rooted in the present day.
She plays stern Detective Martha Lawson, who heads up a unit investigating identity fraud, a phenomenon so commonplace that even Hawes has been a victim of it.
‘Somebody who worked at my house got hold of a card the bills are paid from, so it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d really notice because money goes out without it specifically being “spent”,’ she says.
‘I got a call from the bank and the police — the perpetrator racked up thousands of pounds, which they spent in Tesco, mainly. Bizarre.’
You’d think, then, Hawes would be shredding bank statements with feverish abandon between takes. But the whole escapade hasn’t made her in the least bit paranoid.
‘No, it hasn’t,’ she says breezily. ‘I’m so useless anyway with money or holding on to anything for more than five minutes. My mum bought me a shredder and the kids broke it. You can only be so careful without it taking over your life, really.’
Hawes’s flippancy at such an invasion of privacy isn’t so surprising. After all, Hawes knows what it is to undergo a major identity about-turn.
Six years ago she left her first husband after just five months of marriage for fellow actor Matthew Macfadyen, who she met on BBC spy series Spooks. The tabloids had a field day.
‘I think it’s sort of inevitable to wake up a completely different person when you change your life completely that way, where everything changes overnight,’ she says. ‘Maybe you don’t wake up as a different person but you sort of wake up in somebody else’s life. It’s a really interesting thing to have been through.’
So am I talking to a completely different Keeley Hawes from a decade ago? ‘I feel like a fatter Keeley Hawes,’ she laughs. ‘I feel like a bingo-winged Keeley Hawes. Something like a divorce does change you but children change you more, and now I’ve had three.’
Not that you’d notice from her trim figure — she looks much slimmer than the size 12 she claims to be. What with those big panda eyes, the perfectly enunciated vowels and the fact she’s positively luminescent in Identity, I’m starting to get how this 34-year-old cab driver’s daughter mesmerised her female fans in the BBC’s lesbian love story Tipping the Velvet back in 2002.
‘I had lots of letters and I still get them,’ she says happily. ‘They’re very loyal. It’s nice to have a lady fan base. Now we have Fingersmith and The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister with Maxine Peake. Lesbian dramas… they’re two a penny, aren’t they?’
Husband Macfadyen is now a familiar face in Hollywood, most recently putting in an enjoyably camp turn as the Sheriff of Nottingham opposite Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood.
With Hawes’s star in the ascendant too, is it an exciting time in the Hawes-Macfadyen household? ‘It’s very tiring, but it’s also very nice. Matthew is about to play one of the musketeers in Paul WS Anderson’s new film. It’s not really work is it?’ she guffaws. ‘It’s not work.’
Identity starts on ITV1 and on www.itv.com/itvplayer on Monday.
By Sharon Lougher for The Metro.
(Source: The Metro)