Keeley Hawes plays clever women in authority and plays them small, with a restraint the scripts do not always deserve. For a long time television gave her the poise and kept the good lines; since 2014 the parts have caught up with the playing.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Hawes does when everyone else in the scene is shouting. In Ashes to Ashes (2008), Alex Drake is a psychologist who wakes in 1981 knowing she is in a coma, and the script has her say so, often, in a running commentary on constructs and projections. Glenister roars, the Quattro screeches, and Hawes plays the whole thing at conversational volume, as if she were the only person on set who had read the file. It is her habit: the intelligent woman who is right, being talked over, and declining to raise her voice about it.
The career took a while to find that woman. She began with modelling and small television parts in the mid-1990s, including Dennis Potter's Karaoke (1996), and got her first proper notice as Zoe Reynolds in Spooks (2002). Ashes to Ashes made her a co-lead for three series, and we thought the show louder, prettier and sillier than Life on Mars, coasting on Glenister until it found its nerve. Hawes was a good actor stuck with a character who had seen the previous show. We were sorry for her, and it was the actor we were sorry for, not Alex, which is not what anybody intended; the writing gave her a head start on the audience and then asked her to be surprised, and she was left to act astonishment at things she had already explained to us.
The turn came in 2014, with Lindsay Denton in Line of Duty, the first of three collaborations with Jed Mercurio. What critics have noticed since is consistent: she takes flawed or unlikeable women and makes them people, and she does it with small details rather than technique. Denton is the one she has said she likes more than anybody she has played, and it shows in how little she asks us to like her. Julia Montague in Bodyguard (2018) is the same trick in a better suit. The Durrells (2016–2019) put her in a comedy-drama as Louisa Durrell, and she moved from glamour to something scuffed and harassed without appearing to notice the change, which is the point.
It is rare for a British television actor to have no dissenting school of thought, and Hawes has none we can find. The risk for someone this reliable is that writers start handing her the sensible one, the woman who keeps everything steady while the interesting people fall apart. She is far better when a script trusts her to be disliked. Start with Ashes to Ashes for Glenister and watch what Hawes does in the gaps; then go to the Mercurio series, where the gaps are the part.
Biography
Keeley Hawes is an English actress. She was educated at the Sylvia Young Theatre School and began her career in literary adaptations including Wives and Daughters (1999). She is known for her television roles as Zoe Reynolds in Spooks (2002–2004), Alex Drake in Ashes to Ashes (2008–2010), Lindsay Denton in Line of Duty (2012–2016) and Gemma Webster in The Missing (2014–2016).
Hawes has been nominated three times for the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress, for her performances in Line of Duty and Bodyguard (2018). She is married to actor Matthew Macfadyen.
