After TV hits including Upstairs Downstairs, Keeley Hawes talks about her first theatre role.
It’s odd. When you mention Keeley Hawes to people in her profession, the word they always use is “beautiful”. Which may be true, but television is much less interested in looks for their own sake than film is. A young actress needs something else to last.
“It’s the perfect thing for me,” says Hawes. “It’s an ensemble. I’m not holding the whole thing up, but it’s a lovely part. And it’s here. There are entire floors and departments dedicated solely towards your being able to breathe and speak very loudly. That was one of my main worries.”
The other anxiety is the more general one about her right to be at theatre HQ at all, after half a lifetime of acting in front of the camera.
“It’s odd doing it the wrong way round. Once you’ve been on the telly and then go on to the stage, you have the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that it’s very much, ‘Come on then, so you think you can do it.’ You think somebody is going to come and tell you there’s been a mistake and escort you out of the room.”
It hasn’t happened yet. Meanwhile, she is getting used to the opportunity for character development that is beyond the scope of even long-running television series. “It’s very, very different. Things can change on a daily basis in television. You can be introduced to aspects of your character that you had no idea existed because they didn’t exist a week before. The next week it might be taken away from you in some way that you can’t control.”
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Hawes’s first experience of that world was on Spooks (where she met her husband Matthew Macfadyen, father to two of her three children). She lasted until the third series, when her character Zoe Reynolds was given a new identity in Chile. Recently she went to see Spooks survivor Nicola Walker in the theatre. “I said, ‘Can’t you get me back in from Chile? I saw the first episode of the most recent series, and it was one of the best shows I’ve seen on television for a long time.”
Not that she watches much. She accepted the part of Alex Drake in Ashes to Ashes without having seen its predecessor Life on Mars. Nor had she seen the original Upstairs Downstairs. She asks nervously what I made of the Christmas three-part revival of a costumed classic. I suggest that we never find out what made her character, Lady Agnes Holland, tick.
“That’s another example things being out of your control. If you’ve got something that’s running at an hour and 20 minutes and you’ve got only 58 minutes, things have to go. And you want to scream and say, ‘But now nobody knows why I did that in the next scene.’ What can you do?”
I put to her that for the next series scriptwriter Heidi Thomas ought to let Lady Agnes have an affair, her husband (played by Ed Stoppard) being amazingly dull. “Yeah,” she says. “So do I. I’m going to tell them that.”
One thing you can say about Lady Agnes: she is to the manor born. You’d never guess that Hawes once had elocution lessons as a pupil at Sylvia Young Theatre School, the famous wellspring of popsicles and soap starlets.
“A lot of people do tend to go to those schools because of the types of people that have come out of them.” She mainly attended because “Sylvia Young moved her school to opposite my house. What’s interesting is when you’re taught to speak properly how difficult it is to go back.” When she had a rare film job playing Jason Statham’s wife in The Bank Job, “I had to go and have some lessons in how to drop my accent.”
Hawes has become so posh that she was asked in 2006 to lend her cut-glass vowels to that quintessence of well-bred English womanhood, Lara Croft, on a series of videogames. Being a voicing job, as per usual Hawes was not cast for her looks. “The last one I did I was heavily pregnant. Alas,” she adds, “now my voice is too old.”
And so from the Xbox to the proscenium arch. Arriving at the National was “like the first day at school. There was a lot of terminology that I was still trying to pick up. My husband just laughs and says, ‘It’s going to be fine.’ And actually it’s much more than fine. I’m having one of the nicest experiences I’ve ever had. And that’s a great relief.”
‘Rocket to the Moon’ begins previews at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre (020 7452 3000) on March 23.
By Jasper Rees for The Telegraph.
(source: telegraph.co.uk, my cleaned up grabs from the epaper)