Written by Michael Odell

When did you last speak to a nun? For me it’s been a while, so I’m all ears as Keeley Hawes explains just how earthy and angry they can be.

In her new Channel 4 drama, Falling, there’s a scene in which her character, Sister Anna, loses it with a priest, Father David Hicks (played by Paapa Essiedu). She has “immoral thoughts” about him and they exchange looks, but Father David keeps his feelings well hidden under his cassock.

“You’re a terrible, insecure, cowardly f***er,” Sister Anna cries.

Do nuns really talk like that?

“Yes. We had a debate about that line on set,” Hawes says. “We agreed: nuns are women and they do have strong feelings. For research, I met a nun who went over the wall.”

A nun going over the wall means one who has abandoned the consecrated life.

“You might say she’s got out of the habit,” Hawes says. “See what I did there?”

Falling was created by Jack Thorne, who wrote the award-winning Netflix drama Adolescence. Why has the man who wrote a zeitgeisty drama about online radicalisation (and is busy co-writing four hotly anticipated Beatles biopics) decided to write his first love story about a nun and a Catholic priest?

“Because he has some wonderful ideas about what true love is,” Hawes says.

In the convent, Sister Anna can’t wear make-up or have a smartphone. Also there are no mirrors and, over her 20 years in the convent, she has become “profoundly hairy”.

“And yet I totally see the appeal,” Hawes says. “Look at the pressures young women are under today. Even if they’re not joining a convent, I know a lot of women are getting off social media and joining clubs or embracing traditional hobbies like knitting or baking because, well, they want to be in the moment with like-minded people. I get it.”

Would Hawes make a good nun?

“I’m not sure I could handle being hairy for ever,” she allows thoughtfully. “But mostly I would not want to be without my children.” She has a son, Myles, 26, from a previous marriage to the cartoonist Spencer McCallum, and a daughter, Maggie, 21, and son, Ralph, 19, with her husband, the actor Matthew Macfadyen. “But what I found really interesting,” she continues, “is that nuns are mostly likely to go over the wall during menopause.”

Interesting. I’d have thought chastity in your twenties and thirties would be more challenging.

“Well, yes, maybe they reach menopause and think, ‘I need to have a go.’ ”

‘Sudden and powerful love. It does happen’

According to Hawes, the inciting moment of Falling is lightly inspired by a story Thorne once read. In 2015, a Carmelite nun called Sister Mary Elizabeth living in a convent in Preston, Lancashire, inadvertently touched the sleeve of a visiting friar called Robert. She’d lived an austere, almost silent life for 24 years, but a week later Robert wrote a letter asking to marry her. After experiencing guilt and suicidal thoughts, she eventually accepted.

In Falling, all Sister Anna does is make Father David some scrambled eggs before things start heating up.

“Sudden and powerful love. It does happen,” Hawes says.

That’s true. Hawes had been married to Spencer McCallum for a matter of months when she and Macfadyen met on the set of the BBC drama Spooks in 2002.

“It was awful because I realised I’d fallen for her,” Macfadyen reported afterwards.

“Matthew just came straight out with it and said, ‘I love you,’ in the rain one day,” Hawes added. “I thought, ‘Oh dear, here we go.’ ”

Was it like that?

“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” she says now. “But yes, that’s what happened.”

We are meeting at her club in Chelsea, west London. I’m a bit early. A very attractive young woman in jeans, jumper and flats walks into the bar, says, “Hi,” and hugs me. I think, “That’s nice, but where is Keeley Hawes?” I know that sounds cheesy, but I really didn’t recognise her. Tall and willowy, with razor-sharp cheekbones you surely only get after fasting for 40 days and 40 nights. Hawes, 50, looks amazing.

However, we get off to a difficult start. Her club is quite smart (I’m about to order the house white when I see it’s £30 a glass). We settle into a booth to discuss nun libido. Does Sister Anna lust for Father David or is it something deeper? A well-heeled family in the adjoining booth fall silent when Hawes exclaims, “I made it absolutely clear to Father David three times I don’t want to have sex with him.” We move to another booth.

“Are we spoiling a family lunch?” Hawes asks, concerned.

‘People assume I’m posh’

Does the frisson between Father David and Sister Anna end with a bang or a wimple? You’ll just have to watch Falling to find out. It’s certainly a different role for Hawes, who has now been acting for more than 30 years. Roles like the shady cop Lindsay Denton in Line of Duty or sexy, surly home secretary Julia Montague in the 2018 drama Bodyguard (both of which won her Bafta nominations) have made her one of the UK’s best-loved actors. Tomorrow she will get on a plane to Malta to make the second series of the Prime Video drama The Assassin, in which she plays a hitwoman.

Hawes once jokingly told a journalist, “I knew I was good,” and this throwaway quip became the headline. When it was published, her son Ralph brought her the newspaper.

“He just pointed at the headline, pulled this face as though to say, ‘Mum, that sounds a bit arrogant,’ but, you know, I was joking.”

Hawes is not arrogant. In fact she’s easy, relaxed company and enjoys a joke, even if she did spend her early years doubting herself.

“No one in my family had done anything in entertainment, so early on I did put a lot of pressure on myself: ‘Why wasn’t that better? Why didn’t I get that role?’ ”

She is the daughter of a London cabbie, Tony, and a housewife, Brenda, and grew up in a west London council flat. Her older brothers, Keith and Jamie, both became cab drivers but, aged nine, Hawes won a bursary to the influential Sylvia Young Theatre School nearby.

“That’s another thing journalists get wrong,” she says. “They say I had elocution lessons. I didn’t. The whole class was encouraged to speak in RP [received pronunciation]. You just couldn’t get work with a regional accent so, even 20 years ago, everyone would be speaking the same way. It wouldn’t happen now. These days you get to keep your identity.”

The London accent is gone. Hawes is crisply enunciated and refers to her evening meal as “supper”. Some people find this intimidating.

“I don’t think I sound terribly posh, but I’ve had experiences where I’ve been left out of a conversation about the working-class experience in acting because the assumption is that I am posh, that I had it easy, even though I’m probably more working class than they are. There’s a danger of a sort of inverted snobbery. And anyway, why shouldn’t someone who has had a private education be an actor? Do they all have to be bankers?”

I point out her husband, Matthew Macfadyen, was educated privately and attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

“It’s quite interesting to have seen it from both sides. Yes, he was privately educated, but he came from a very working-class family. His dad was bright, got a good job and worked hard. So yes, my husband was privately educated but I don’t like the assumptions that go with that.”

When she was left out of the conversation about working-class actors, why didn’t she speak up?

“If someone is going to make assumptions based on the sound of my voice, I’m not interested,” she says firmly.

‘I’m not as special as I thought I was’

There’s another reason discussing tough issues on a modern film or TV set might not be easy. In the days before smartphones, a cast might hang out and bond. These days, actors are often scrolling between takes.

“I’m going to sound like I’m 102, but part of being an actor is talking and listening to people,” she says. “Sometimes I see youngsters on their phones and I think, ‘Why?’ Michael Gambon [Hawes appeared with the late Shakespearean actor in the 2015 adaptation of JK Rowling’s novel The Casual Vacancy] didn’t sit there on his phone. He spoke to people and I learnt and gained so much confidence from him.”

The Sylvia Young school has nurtured all kinds of entertainers, from reality stars to TV presenters, actors including Nicholas Hoult and Daniel Kaluuya, and singers like Amy Winehouse, Dua Lipa and Spice Girl Emma Bunton. Hawes was a contemporary of Bunton and the pair lived together for a while after graduating.

Is it true Hawes advised her friend to leave the Spice Girls before they’d even released a record?

“Yes,” she says. “But I had nothing against the group. Emma was at boot camp training to be a Spice Girl and she came home one weekend feeling very homesick. She said she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back and I said, ‘Just leave. Stay here with me, I’ll look after you.’ It can be really tough when you’re young and starting out. Sometimes you’re working hard without sight of the end goal and it’s daunting being away from people you love.”

Sylvia Young died aged 85 last year and Hawes attended her funeral in London.

“It was incredible, a true celebration of someone who really changed British entertainment. Our classroom had people from every walk of life, every religion, every colour, every sexuality. And at that time, that was very unusual. But the thing I learnt at the funeral was that I’m not as special as I thought I was. I always thought I was one of the few who received a bursary. But talking to people, everyone had one. The important thing is British entertainment looks different today because Sylvia Young gave a chance to people who otherwise wouldn’t have got one.”

Hawes has also done her bit by backing the campaign Acting Your Age, which lobbies for better representation of women over 45, and by using the clout of her production company, Buddy Club, to back dramas that otherwise might be overlooked.

“Things are better but there’s still a lot to do,” she says. “People will think it’s sour grapes because I wasn’t nominated but … look at this year’s Bafta TV nominations. They’re not exactly screaming diversity in terms of people or age, are they?”

‘There is sometimes a sense you can’t do anything right’

Hawes has been in the trenches and come under fire on this issue herself. In 2020 her production company made Honour, a drama inspired by the 2006 honour killing of 20-year-old British Muslim woman Banaz Mahmod. The story was told through the eyes of a white detective, DCI Caroline Goode, played by Hawes. It won an award but some took issue with the story being told from the policewoman’s perspective.

“There is sometimes a sense you can’t do anything right,” she says, sighing. “Because really, what was the alternative? The alternative was to tell the story of a life of horrific violence, relentless horror in an arranged marriage. Who’s going to watch that? Is it not better to tell the story as we did from the point of view of the police investigation, which was not perfect but Caroline Goode did an incredible job bringing these people to justice. She won the Police Medal for her work and we had the backing of charities that we spoke to and family members of Banaz Mahmod. It was a very brave thing for ITV to make it and seven million people watched it. So that’s seven million people who are now informed about honour killings, which is surely better than not telling that story. I’m very, very proud of it.”

Hawes certainly doesn’t duck the tough or controversial roles. In 2024 she played Amanda Thirsk, private secretary to the former Prince Andrew, in Scoop, which told the story of the fateful Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis. It was Thirsk who approved the interview. Therein lay a major acting challenge: should Thirsk be portrayed almost as an enabler or a woman simply doing an impossible job?

“Matthew and I have this conversation a lot partly because of what’s going on in the world and the people who surround Trump,” Hawes says. “Who are these people around him? I think we’re all wondering, you know, when is somebody going to step up and say this is wrong? Nobody does. But regarding Amanda Thirsk, I never met her. She signed an NDA. But it’s worth remembering that, even until quite recently, women simply wouldn’t work again if they questioned certain men indulging in certain behaviour. And it’s also worth remembering there were plenty of people who liked Prince Andrew.”

Hawes’ career has spanned big cultural changes. Her first screen sex scene was in the 1996 Dennis Potter TV drama Karaoke. She wore several flesh-coloured thongs while co-star Richard E Grant mounted her wearing a cricket box gaffer-taped to his groin (he also kept his brogues and socks on). She can still laugh at that.

But her views on the modelling she did in the Nineties have changed. She was talent-spotted at 15 by the Select agency while walking down Oxford Street in London. It’s striking how, in old interviews, Hawes called it “fun”. Latterly, however, she has said the experience was “horrific”.

“I did have fun. I made some great friends. I travelled. A lot of people were great. But looking back, a lot of it was not. When I started acting, the sort of expectations of doing a piece like this, you would then go to the photoshoot to accompany it and there would just be a rail of underwear, and you’d have no press person with you. I’ve been reading Melanie Sykes’s autobiography. [In her 2023 book, Illuminated, the former model and broadcaster describes being sent, aged 18, to a photoshoot in Africa and being forced to share a room with a photographer twice her age.] Some sections made me feel incredibly emotional. What young women were expected to do … In so many scenarios, if you were a young woman you just took a deep breath and did it.”

Hawes’ son Ralph has signed with Select. Has she warned him what to expect?

“Well, he signed up to earn money to go interrailing and then didn’t actually do any modelling,” she says. “In any case, the care for young models is much better now.”

‘If something needs fixing, I love to have a go’

Hawes is good company, warm and open, but she can be tough. When the barman starts crashing around with ice tongs and a bucket, it only takes one sharp look for him to get the message. However, she used to get anxious and suffer from bouts of depression.

“The things I used to worry about when I was young seem ridiculous now,” she says. “All young people do it, don’t they? ‘Why didn’t I do this?’ ‘Why did I say that?’ ‘Why haven’t I got more friends?’ ”

Not now. She and Macfadyen recently moved to a Chelsea townhouse where she tends her garden (“I’m very pleased with my recent tulips”), does Pilates and walks her rescue dogs, Lula and Buster. As she sips water, I can’t help noticing a hand injury.

“An accident with a drill,” she says. “If something needs fixing, I love to have a go.”

At home, Macfadyen does the cooking, and Hawes admits that early in their marriage she’d sometimes buy a ready meal for dinner, come home and mess up some kitchen utensils to pretend she’d made it.

“That’s another example,” she says. “I used to worry, ‘Why don’t I know how to cook?’ But these days I’m very much, ‘Who cares?’ ”

In fact, Hawes is quite bullish about her quirky tastes. As a recent guest on the food podcast Dish (hosted by Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett), she discussed her signature “Keeley Sandwich”: chicken and lettuce accompanied by butter, cream cheese, mayo and Branston pickle.

“I stand by my sandwich,” she says. “As you get older, you realise what makes you happy. I know a cream cheese, pickle and mayo combination looks questionable on paper, but try it. It’s a crowd-pleaser.”

What are the other building blocks of midlife happiness?

“No 1 is family, of course, then trusted friends and then simply being grateful and excited still to be working. Also, a woman needs a good gynaecologist.”

Once again the bar falls silent.

“Just to get my HRT exactly right,” she clarifies.

When she got the script for Falling, she and Macfadyen discussed the appeal of living in a religious order.

“We both had the same thought: when it comes down to it, what actually makes people happy? It’s having a purpose in life and also feeling supported and loved when you get home. That’s what nuns have. They’ve discarded the noisy and confusing bits of modern life.”

Perhaps that’s why real-world nun applications are on the rise. The numbers are still very modest (about 20 women enter UK convents annually) but there are now even TikTok accounts extolling the virtues of chastity and silence. One senior cleric has speculated that young women feel there is a “gap in the market” for meaning.

“Jack [Thorne] has some beautiful things to say about this,” Hawes says. “There are many different types of love. Our love for our children or parents is different from the love we have for a husband or boyfriend. And what Sister Anna glimpses with Father David is far more profound than simply lust.”

Hawes is not about to enter a convent. However, she does keep an eye out for women who are successfully navigating life and seeing if there are lessons to be learnt. Gwyneth Paltrow, the high priestess of glam woo-woo, springs to mind.

“I think Gwyneth has such a healthy attitude to life,” she says. “She doesn’t seem to give a shit what people think and I try to have a bit of that attitude in my life. Turning 50, I didn’t even think about my birthday. I had a few days away with Matthew but no big bash. I’ve never felt happier or more confident. You gain a little armour and care a little less. Sister Anna feels she’s missed out on something in life. I don’t feel like that at all.”

Falling will be available to watch and stream from May 19 on Channel 4 at 9pm

Find the photoshoot and magazine scans in our photo gallery

Source: The Times Magazine