Agent Provocateur
Keeley Hawes is known for playing snooty Victorian ladies but she’d far rather talk about Prince Phillip, big bottoms and her new role as a spy.
‘I’m a big old bird,’ says Keeley Hawes, the pert princess of costume drama with the flawless voice. ‘I’m a bit too big to be girly. I look ridiculous when I try to be girly.’
Hawes is wearing black trousers from French Connection, a little jumper from Joseph, and pop socks with ladders, which she shows me. ‘There’s quite a lot of me,’ she says. She is actually a tall, unusually pretty 26-year-old with short hair and an elegant figure; she was a model in her teens and retains the models hypocritical awareness of her body. ‘Still,’ she says cheerfully, ‘I’m very lucky I don’t suffer with skin problems, I don’t have a hunch, and I don’t have bow legs.’
In costume dramas Hawes often plays women who are bossy and prim, or bossy and nurturing, or just bossy. her characters have perfect carriage; she can express a great deal just by the way she holds her neck. she was flirty Cynthia in the Andrew Davies adaptation of Wives and Daughters (1999), and darling Lizzie in Our Mutual Friend (1998), kissing Paul McGann with perfect puckered lips on his sick bed. ‘There all a bit snooty,’ she says of her Victorian characters ‘and they’re all a bit knowing.’
You might also recall Hawes as the younger Diana Dors in the television biopic The Blonde Bombshell (1998), a role she does not remember with relish. She put on weight, dyed her hair platinum blonde, and shimmied around with lots of exposed cleavage. She was brilliant. ‘I was miscast,’ she says ‘in the end it was fine. But personally that wasn’t one of my greatest moments.’
Sitting on a big white sofa in a house in West London, Hawes tells me about her most recent roles. She’s just been filming another Andrew Davies-scripted costume drama, in which she plays Kitty Butler, a Victorian male impersonator. ‘It’s about sexual awakening,’ says Hawes with a touch of coyness ‘Rachael Stirling works in an oyster house in Whitstable, and I come in, and she falls in love with me. Then we both become male impersonators.’
She’s also been playing Zoe, an MI-5 agent in a new drama series called Spooks, which begins on BBC one this week. Zoe is highly intelligent and a little mysterious; she’s a bit of a boffin, rather than the sort of secret agent who drives around in sports cars shooting people. Iin order to research the role, Hawes spent time with former members of the intelligence community. ‘The main question,’ she says ‘is why do they do it? We just couldn’t understand it. I believe they get paid peanuts, just nothing, and you can’t tell anybody what you do, so there’s no glory, if that’s what you’re after. If it was me I’d have a couple of glasses down the pub and I’d be letting all and sundry now I was a spy!’
Consumed by a fit of girlish giggles, she rocks back in her chair. ‘One man told me it was a sexual thing,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know what to make of it. Another guy said he did it because he was told he’d never have to lift anything heavier than his dick.’
In person, Hawes is much closer to her Diana Dors character than anything else she’s played. She’s a scream; she blurts out whatever’s on her mind. when I tell her that this trait reminds me of Prince Phillip, she says, ‘I rather like Prince Phillip.’ she is one of those television people who watches a lot of television. ‘Did you see that thing on streakers the other day?’ She says. she regales me with descriptions of streakers’ bottoms. Then she says ‘do you remember that Marks & Spencers ad when that woman ran across the hills with a big fat arse?’ The word ‘arse’ makes her laugh like a demon.
She wants me to know that she’s not actually posh and proper; she’s a taxi drivers daughter from Marylebone. in fact, she comes from a taxi driving family; her grandfather was a cabbie, and so are both her brothers. She was consumed with a passion for performing when she played the pied piper in a school production at the age of eight. a teacher suggested drama school, and her parents sent her to the Sylvia Young theatre school which was down the road. The reason she sounds like an eligible young girl in a BBC costume drama is that she took elocution lessons at Sylvia Youngs, which she attended with lots of other famous people who turned out quite differently – Samantha Janus, Emma Bunton, the Appleton sisters from All Saints, Danni Behr, Martine Mccutcheon, and Denise Van Outen.
‘Every other seat was a gonnabe,’ she says wearily. Having brought the subject up, she tells me she hates talking about it. ‘People,’ she says of her alma mater, ‘are often a bit sort of frowny. I don’t think it’s seen as being a drama school – I think it’s seen as being somewhere that turns out miniature pop stars. It’s not like saying I studied at RADA, lets face it. Well, I don’t care about that. But I don’t like being pigeon holed as being in a class with whoever I was in a class with. It’s a bit of a pain, really. I can’t get away from it. It’s so boring!’
Notice how Hawes, unlike all the other girls is the only one to have stuck with the elocution. All the others have drifted into trendy estuary. ‘I think it’s because I did more drama,’ says Hawes. ‘To me doing elocution was like learning to read and write. Because I started it at an early age, it kind of stuck. I was nine when I started. I only did it as much as everybody else. I don’t go home speaking another way. It’s not something I’m pretending to do. I can’t help.’ Then she says ‘people often think I’m something, and I’m not.’
When Hawes was 15 she was spotted in the street by a scout from Select Models agency. Having good skin and a pretty face, she appeared in advertisements for Clearasil. she left modeling, which she found ‘seedy’, to work as a fashion assistant at various magazines – Just Seventeen, She and Cosmopolitan. It was then that she was offered her first proper acting job – the role of Richard E Grants mistress in Dennis Potters Karaoke (1996), in which she took part in a potterishly brutal sex scene.
Then the costume dramas began. There was The Moonstone (1996), and then The Beggar Bride (1997), in which Hawes gave birth on screen, something she has since done in reality. ‘I was very contained when I did it in The Beggar Bride,’ she says. ‘But it’s much more physical. It really hurts. It’s one of those things you can never know about until you’ve done it.’ She is married to Spencer, 29, a producer of animated films, and they live with their one-year-old son, Myles, in Esher, an hours drive from London.
‘I used to worry about people liking me, but now I don’t care,’ she says ‘I’ve got a husband and a baby,’ and, of course, two new roles. Talking about Zoe, the spy, she says ‘I’m playing her as a normal person. A slightly confused normal person. There’s a sort of uncertainty about her. She’s unsure whether she’s good enough for the job. I suppose she’s like me waiting for somebody to say, “Oi, you!” waiting for the rug to get pulled from under her feet.’