Keeley Hawes on ‘Bodyguard’, fighting insecurity and the pay gap

Keeley Hawes was in a theme park when she first realised the scale of the success of Bodyguard, the BBC thriller in which she starred earlier this year. It was her youngest son’s birthday, and she had flown back to the UK from Corfu — where she was shooting the latest season of another television show, The Durrells — to take him and his friends to ride roller coasters at Thorpe Park in Surrey.

She suddenly discovered she was a very familiar face to masses of people. “I knew [the series] was doing all right, but I didn’t know what I was walking into,” she says. “Nothing is as odd as finding yourself in the centre of Bodyguard and what happened this year — nothing. I think we are all still slightly reeling from it.”

The series, a six-part nail-biter in which Hawes plays a home secretary who has become an assassination target for terrorists, broke BBC records; the box set has had more plays on iPlayer than any other, while the finale was watched by 17.1 million people, making it the most popular episode of any BBC drama since records began in 2002.

The show also confirmed Hawes as one of the most versatile and watchable British actors of her generation; as compelling in the role of a hawkish, brittle politician who falls for her bodyguard as she is funny in the ITV adaptation of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, where she plays the devoted mother of four rebellious children.

In person she is warm, self-deprecating and endearingly down-to-earth. We meet on a freezing day in late November and she is bundled up in a beautiful grey alpaca coat. “Do you want to touch it? It’s so soft, I’m rather pleased with it,” she coos, holding out a fluffy sleeve.

In some respects it is hard to believe that Hawes has been able to get away with relative anonymity for so long; she has been acting since her teens, starting with small parts in shows like Heartbeat before landing bigger roles in costume dramas such as The Moonstone, Wives and Daughters and Tipping the Velvet. 

She lent her voice to Lara Croft in five Tomb Raider video games and, for a couple of years in the early 2000s, played an MI5 case officer in Spooks, the soapy spy drama, which is where she met her husband, the actor Matthew Macfadyen.

Despite the exhaustive list of credits, she has struggled with insecurity and confides that before she was cast in Bodyguard, she had five months without work. “I was thinking, ‘Right, it’s time to start thinking about something else,’” she says. “[That feeling] never goes away. You are constantly thinking, ‘Nobody wants me’ . . . It’s such a personal reaction. So I don’t know what I’m doing still in this industry,” she laughs. 

Yet she is also clear about why she has stuck it out. “Matthew and I love our jobs. We’re so aware of how lucky we are to be working, to work in an industry that we’ve chosen, and we’ve managed, somehow, to make careers out of it.”

Hawes was born in 1976 and grew up on a council estate in Marylebone in central London, “before it was as gentrified as it is now”. She was the youngest of four children; her father was a black-cab driver and her mother a homemaker. 

“I had a very happy childhood really, because only one of my parents worked and there were lots of us. It wasn’t especially luxurious, but quite often when I started out [the media would say] it was like this ‘rags to riches’ story and that’s not the case . . . We didn’t have holidays every year but in those days people didn’t.”

From a young age she loved reading and would borrow books voraciously from the Marylebone library. Acting was not something she initially pursued — instead, it landed on her doorstep, when the performing arts institution, the Sylvia Young Theatre School, ­relocated “into an old church opposite where I lived”. 

Hawes’ parents asked if she wanted to try out for a place after she impressed ­everyone in a performance of The Pied Piper at school; she reprised the role at her audition and got in. Quite quickly she was doing ­commercials and minor TV parts, alongside normal academic studies and stagecraft ­training of all kinds — tap, ballet, improvisation.

Her first serious role after leaving was in Karaoke, one of the last works by the late screenwriter Dennis Potter, and it led to her being signed by an agent. “Sylvia [Young] called and said, ‘I’ve got an audition for you if you want it,’ by which time I was 18,” she recalls. “It was undoubtedly down to Sylvia. Without her I wouldn’t have the career that I have now.”

In many of her previous roles, Hawes has been somewhat typecast as the likeable heroine, from the sweet, downtrodden Lizzie Hexham in Our Mutual Friend (1998) to the conscientious spy Zoe Reynolds in Spooks. That finally changed when her agent contacted her about a job on the second series of Line of Duty (2014), the gripping police procedural created by the screenwriter Jed Mercurio. 

Pale, sullen, her face framed by a heavy fringe, Hawes is exceptional as DI Lindsay Denton, arousing both suspicion and sympathy as the audience tries to decipher whether she is totally corrupt or has just made a series of unfortunate mistakes.

“Lindsay Denton was amazing for me,” she says. “It did change everything really in terms of how people had seen me up until then. It was so unglamorous and so dowdy — and it got dark, and I just hadn’t had the opportunity to do that before.”

Part of Hawes’ genius as an actor is her ability to make even morally ambiguous characters likeable; we root for both Denton and home secretary Julia Montague even as we watch them act in questionable ways. Both characters were created by Mercurio, who is now on his sixth series of Line of Duty, and who has a record of ­writing complex, three-dimensional roles not just for men but for women too, a skill that has sometimes seemed in short supply in television. 

As a Hollywood Reporter review said of the Montague character: “There’s a Machiavellian trait in her that’s welcome, since it’s so regularly given to men in power instead.”

“I think what Jed does — and I think he’s brilliant — from conversations I’ve had with him and what I’ve read about him is that his casting is basically gender-blind,” Hawes says. “So you could have had a female bodyguard and a male politician. In anything he does, any of the parts could be played by a man or a woman.”

Cultural shifts since Hawes ­­joined the industry have also opened up the roles available. In a lot of 1980s television, she recalls, “women were more passive, unless you get somebody like Alexis in Dynasty. She was one of the strongest female characters and one of the things I remember most clearly from the 1980s because it was so unusual to have a woman like that in your living room. 

“Usually a woman playing a part like that was a ‘bitch’, wholly unlikeable or ambitious or all the things that were looked down on. Now those things are beginning to be celebrated — not being a bitch,” she laughs uproariously, “but having ambition. It’s funny how it has changed — but it has all changed for the good.”

One of her upcoming projects is the film Misbehaviour, starring Keira Knightley and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, about the real-life Miss World contest of 1970, when feminist activists disrupted the event in protest at its commodification of women. “It’s so timely. You read [the script] and you think, ‘This story is amazing, why hasn’t it been made [before]?’ And, actually, it’s because now is the right time.”

I ask her about the gender pay gap and the revelation in March this year that Claire Foy was paid less for her leading role in The Crown than her co-star Matt Smith. “It is extraordinary that it’s 2018 and we’re only just scratching the surface of that really. It’s embarrassing,” Hawes says. “I’m 42 and I’ve only just said, ‘Well, I want to be paid the same as the person I’m doing the same amount of work as.’ And I’ve been in this industry for 30-odd years. It’s taken me that long.”

She credits her ability to have that conversation to “people at the top end shouting about it and doing something about it”, mentioning Jennifer Lawrence, who wrote a powerful op-ed on the gender pay gap in 2015, and Amy Adams, who has also spoken on the subject. 

“People were saying, ‘Surely they make lots of money, they earn millions’ — but that’s not the point. The trickle-down [effect] that that had did more for everybody else in that industry who doesn’t earn a million a movie . . . It was incredibly important and brave of those women.”

What about #MeToo — has that changed things? “It is, again, the few brave people who speak up. And they did, and we can only be grateful for that, because it set the ball rolling and justice is being done in certain cases. In certain cases, it isn’t. It is one of those things that’s going to take time but at least it’s changing. I’m trying to be very positive here,” she says, laughing at her carefully calibrated answer.

It is a characteristic aside; she is one of those people for whom honesty matters. Her candour is part of what makes her so well liked in the industry. Richard Goulding, an actor who has worked with her on an upcoming Channel 4 series Traitors, tells me that on set she is not only “a consummate performer — subtle, deep, funny, light at the right time”, but also “grounded and incredibly kind and generous”.

She can also be fierce. While she was filming in Corfu in September, the Mail on Sunday published a story claiming she had lost weight for Bodyguard through an “alkaline diet and an exercise regime”. “I just saw this thing on my Twitter feed about this absolute nonsense, total utter fabrication,” she recalls. It is the only time in the interview that her tone hardens. “It’s dangerous, actually, is what it is, and it was wrong on so many levels.”

She replied to the article, which was headlined, “Talk of the town: Keeley Hawes lost a stone for role”, with a pitch-perfect Twitter put-down: “Um, no, I didn’t. #whowritesthisshite? #whatthefuckisanalkalinediet?” Her tweet has been liked 44,000 times and retweeted more than 7,000 times. She’s sort of embarrassed, but also not. “I didn’t mean to take on the tabloids in that way, but sometimes you just have to stand up for yourself . . . It was utterly, utterly wrong so I thought it was worth dragging up.”

Although she remains ridiculously modest about her achievements, the changing climate and her success in Bodyguard and The Durrells have clearly boosted her confidence. Her ambition is to produce; she has just served as an executive producer on the final series of The Durrells — “everything from putting the crew together to casting. It’s taken me like a hundred years to get to this. Five years ago I wouldn’t have even thought it was a possibility and now it is, and it’s really exciting.”

Esther Bintliff is the FT Weekend Magazine’s deputy editor.

This article was amended to reflect that it was the Mail on Sunday, not the Daily Mail, that published a story claiming Hawes had lost weight for “Bodyguard”

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