Eve Hewson on Catfishing Strangers and Her New Starring Roles

Hewson is starring in two dramatic television series that debuted earlier in February: Netflix’s Behind Her Eyes and The Luminaries on Starz, which originally premiered on BBC One in England last year. Until now, she’s been best known for playing nurse Lucy Elkins in The Knick, Steven Soderbergh’s historical drama about the staff of New York’s Knickerbocker Hospital in the early 20th century. Last year, she played Anne Morgan (daughter of J.P. Morgan) in the Tesla biopic, starring Ethan Hawke; in the movie, Morgan is both narrator of the film and love interest of Hawke’s Nikola Tesla. 

Hewson grew up in Dublin with older sister Jordan, 31, and younger brothers Elijah, 21, and John, 19. “I couldn’t have had a better childhood,” she says. “Irish people, the Irish life, it’s unmatched.” She says the most valuable thing she learned from her parents is the importance of surrounding yourself with good people. Bono and Ali Hewson have been together since they were 15, and many of their friends are from high school. Hewson says she always knew she wanted to act, and when she was 18, she moved to New York to study drama at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. But by the time she was 26, Hewson wasn’t sure if she wanted to continue acting. “I was a bit bored with the roles that were being written,” she says. “[But] because of #MeToo, things started to change.” 

Her character in The Luminaries was made into the show’s protagonist after the BBC rejected an early draft of the script featuring male characters as the leads. Overnight, Eleanor Catton, who’s both the screenwriter of the series and the author of the 2013 novel it’s based on, drafted a new outline that centered on Hewson’s character story. The story is set in 19th-century New Zealand, where prospectors traveled to get rich during the gold rush. Hewson plays the explorer Anna Wetherell, who meets a potential love interest (played by Himesh Patel) on the boat over from London. By the end of filming, she’d found her love for acting again. 

At times playing Anna—who endures violence and jail time—was physically and emotionally exhausting. “I was a bit of a hermit when I was in New Zealand; I wasn’t really myself,” she says. She took long baths and got acupuncture and massages when her body felt beaten up. She also planned a trip with friends to Hawaii to have something to look forward to at the end of filming. “It was an amazing feeling to finish something that was such a big experience and challenge in my life. And then I went and got shitfaced on a beach with my friends,” she says. “Then I was fine.” 

Behind Her Eyes, the other show Hewson stars in this month, is a psychological thriller set in London and based on the 2017 book of the same name by Sarah Pinborough. The story centers on a single mom named Louise (played by Simona Brown) who begins an affair with her married boss, David (Tom Bateman), while simultaneously befriending David’s wife Adele (Hewson). Hewson’s Adele is a complicated character, who at times seems like a meek woman being controlled by her husband and during others seems like a more manipulative and disturbed character. Adele is the role she calls the best experience of her career because of the character’s power. “Being able to manipulate an audience and [the other] characters and to make choices people didn’t understand was really satisfying,” she says.

Hewson was cast late and only got to read the full script on the plane to rehearsals. She focused the bulk of her preparation on learning a British accent in two weeks and ended up loving the “sink or swim” feeling of throwing herself into the character. “Those intense emotions come quite easily to me, and I felt really comfortable playing someone who was on that level of hysteria, which probably isn’t a good thing,” she says. She also discovered that eternal Hollywood absurdity: filming sex scenes. For one romantic interlude, instead of looking into David’s eyes, she had to look into the lens of a camera poised above her. “I was lying in bed, caressing the camera, looking to the lens going, I love you, I love you,” she says, “The bed we were on was actually two single beds put together, and then I started to fall down the crack [in the middle]. It was a shit show.”