That may change in the coming months. The actress is starring opposite Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber in the buzzy Netflix adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s The Perfect Couple, premiering Thursday, and she will be back for the second season of Bad Sisters on November 13, reprising her role as the youngest and wildest sister, Becka Garvey. She just finished filming a part in Noah Baumbach’s new movie, which stars George Clooney and Adam Sandler, and is about to start a television pilot from Alec Berg (Barry) set in the world of Formula One racing.
Hewson has long had a complicated relationship with fame – understandable given that her father is Bono, the U2 frontman and global activist. It’s easy to feel invisible when your dad is gobbling up all the attention.
Routinely deemed a “nepo baby” before the phrase was in vogue, Hewson has long since given up on defending where she came from as the reason for her success. She knows that having a famous father certainly helped. Her first acting gig came from a tutor she had while on the road with U2, an aspiring filmmaker who cast her in a short. She loved the experience and never looked back.
Hewson said she never worried about how she would be perceived, going into a business that would – if she were successful – bring her own fame and attention.
“I was just like, I’m going to do this; I’m obsessed with this; this is just going to happen,” she said over lunch in Los Angeles, where she now lives. “I kind of can’t believe I did it.”
Genuinely funny in conversation, Hewson displays a relatability that belies her self-described upbringing “among rock stars and supermodels”. As a child, she constantly questioned whether people were her friends because they liked her, or because they liked her father. (Or because they liked her swimming pool, which in Dublin are almost as exotic as rock stars.)
But one upside of such uncertainty is a stronger sense of self.
“I don’t really believe in other people’s opinions,” said Hewson, dressed in a black silk skirt and a black T-shirt with “Every woman has a fantasy,” emblazoned on the chest. “Obviously it affects me, but I’ve learned to trust myself and trust my gut and trust my taste.”
Still, she said that unlike some of her experiences growing up, she is able to take in and appreciate others’ appraisals of her acting without questioning their motives. The thing that feels the most “real” to her is pretending to be someone else.
“When people come up to me and say, ‘You’re the crazy wife from that show on Netflix,’ I’m like, ‘Oh, you’re actually recognising me and my work,’” she said. “They probably have no idea of the connection or don’t even care. It’s a nice feeling.”
In The Perfect Couple, Hewson plays Amelia Sacks, a down-to-earth Central Park zookeeper who is about to marry into a wealthy Nantucket family ruled by a matriarch named Greer Garrison Winbury (Kidman), a bestselling author obsessed with maintaining her family’s pristine image. A death on the eve of the wedding threatens to disrupt the facade.
Hewson’s character is a kind of audience surrogate, there to be alternately fascinated and horrified by the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Privileged eccentricities are familiar for Hewson – what was demanding was grappling with the overwhelming grief her character faces in the series. Even amid an ensemble cast that also features Dakota Fanning and Jack Reynor, Hewson’s role as the outsider was isolating, especially since her character feels far bigger emotions than anyone else.
“I luckily haven’t fully experienced a death that’s so close to me,” she said. “It was hard for me to wrap my head around what that would feel like. Am I in denial? Am I completely engulfed in grief? I felt like my character had a lot of weight to it, and was the emotional beat of the story. That was the most challenging.”
She also had to go toe to toe with Kidman, whose character considers Hewson’s Amelia to be both beneath her son and a threat to the family.
“Eve holds her own,” said Susanne Bier, the director of the six-episode series. “It’s not even difficult for her.” Bier added that she cast Hewson because she wanted her “normal” protagonist to be played by “a complex human being who had secrets”.
“You look at her face; you look at her eyes,” Bier said. “You know that she does show you part of what she’s thinking, but not all of it.”
Hewson felt far more vulnerable playing Becka in Bad Sisters, who she said is the closest of any character she has played to her own personality. But she had to work for the part. The show’s creator, Sharon Horgan, said Apple executives asked for another audition because they weren’t sure the actress could do comedy. While playing Becka did involve recalling distinct, and often unpleasant, emotions from her childhood – feeling like a screw-up, feeling misunderstood – one thing she was confident about showcasing was her comic ability.
Hewson discovered that talent when, at 25, she starred opposite Andie MacDowell in a small romantic comedy called Paper Year (2018), written and directed by Rebecca Addelman.
“I was like, oh, yeah, I’m good at this,” Hewson said. “I should do more of this.”
Horgan said, “She can kind of do anything. She can break your heart and make you laugh.”
Hewson thinks a lot about the symbiotic connections she has had with directors like Horgan and Bier. The occasional Soderbergh aside, whom she also reveres, she has tended to work with female filmmakers – others on her wish list include Greta Gerwig and Marielle Heller.
“It’s a very bizarre relationship between actor and director – it’s almost like you’re a baby and you’re, like, being breastfed or something,” she said, laughing. “It’s like this weird trust that you have to have in this person who’s going to protect you and nourish you and give you everything that you need.”
Horgan, for one, would be happy to keep working with Hewson. “I think she’s going to have a ridiculous career,” Horgan said.
“She can be all sorts of different people – a teenage girl and an adult woman,” she added. “The main thing is, she makes me feel something.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Nicole Sperling
Photographs by: Olivia Crumm
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
