When Eve Hewson was in her late teens, a young Irishwoman in America trying to get her acting career off the ground, casting directors kept knocking her back. “I got this note a lot, which was ‘She’s just too European’,” she says.

Hewson interpreted it to mean that she seemed mature for her age, maybe a little worldly – at least compared to the college students she was auditioning to play. “I was coming in feeling like a 25-year-old, even though I was 18, and I think that’s what they meant. It’s almost like I’d seen too much.”

Those casting directors weren’t totally off the mark. Before she could legally drink in the States, Hewson had lived two radically different lives: as a shy Dublin schoolgirl with a vision of becoming an actor, and as the daughter of U2 frontman Bono who made a habit of tagging along on the band’s colossal stadium tours.

Talking about her childhood, Hewson drops a reference to Hannah Montana, the undercover pop star Miley Cyrus played in the Disney Channel series. “I had a very regular, almost suburban life, and then I also went away with my parents on tour and had this rock’n’roll experience.”

If that unusual life worked against her when she was younger, making her seem too seasoned – too experienced – to play the ingenue, it is working for her now.

After landing her first feature credit at 17, Hewson has been steadily building a reputation as an actor you can trust to reward your attention – beginning with her breakout in 2014’s The Knick, via projects like the twisty thriller Behind Her Eyes, and Apple TV+’s black comedy Bad Sisters. Along the way she’s gone head-to-head with heavyweights like Tom Hanks (in Steven Spielberg’s 2015 Cold War drama Bridge of Spies), Sean Penn (in Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be The Place) and James Gandolfini (in Nicole Holofcener’s divorce romcom Enough Said). But, until recently, it’s not translated to much of what you’d call celebrity. A few months ago, the New York Times declared that Hewson “keeps getting discovered”. “It’s true, I do,” she says.

Hewson chalks up the waves of audience discovery to the diversity of the roles she’s chosen: “I don’t think people who watched Behind Her Eyes would ever have seen the Nicole Holofcener movie.” Not that that was deliberate, an attempt to show off her range or avoid being pigeonholed. “It’s just the jobs that I get,” she laughs.

That pattern was finally upended this summer, with the much-binged Netflix series The Perfect Couple. One of 2024’s spikiest cultural moments, Susanne Bier’s high-society murder-mystery not only pitted Hewson against Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber, as the everywoman set to marry into a wealthy Nantucket family, it tasked her with carrying its eat-the-rich message through a beguilingly bonkers plot. “We had the time of our life on that job,” she says. The show’s instantly-memeable opening credits – the entire cast inexplicably doing a TikTok-style group dance – are a testament to the inclusive set created by director Susanne Bier. “We wouldn’t have done that had we not liked her.”

The Perfect Couple shot to the top of streaming charts and put Hewson’s talents in the spotlight in a way that she hadn’t yet really experienced. Rather than hold her back, her experience is grounding her, even as her career takes off. “I remember my agent saying, ‘That note will stand to [help] you more than it will hurt you’,” says Hewson, now 33, of the “European” feedback that dogged her early on. “Now that I’m a little bit older, I think I fit more into that world.” Indeed, you get the sense, from Hewson’s wry self-awareness and slightly intimidating drive, that she was born for this.

Hewson is wielding a glass of champagne in a suite at Claridge’s hotel in London. “And it’s on Apple,” she says, toasting to the studio covering the bill. “Cheers – to whatever day it is!” (It is Thursday.)

The conversation turns to Sharon Horgan’s darkly comic whodunnit Bad Sisters, which became a surprise hit when its first season dropped on Apple in 2022. Adapted from the Belgian series Clan, the show follows a group of sisters conspiring to kill their abusive brother-in-law and is sometimes harrowing in its depiction of domestic violence. “We didn’t think anybody would watch our show,” says Hewson. “We just loved it and believed in Sharon.” (Among the show’s string of Emmy nods and a prestigious Peabody Award win, Hewson’s performance was nominated for a Hollywood Critics Association TV Award; even the famously snide website Gawker singled her out as “really good”.)

Playing the baby of a family of big personalities, Hewson could have been lost in the crowd; instead, she made the quietest person in the room the most compelling to watch. Despite a sometimes-flinty exterior, Becka feels deeply and is fiercely driven to protect those she loves. Hewson says she’s similar: “I have a good, stone-cold resting bitch face, I’ve been told, but inside, I’m very sensitive and kind of mushy – and I saw that in Becka.”

Hewson credits Horgan with writing women as they really are behind closed doors – something still uncommon, she says, even in this age of more robust female characters on screen. “This is what bothers me a lot: [shows] might have multiple women in a cast, but they’ll be opposing in some way. There’ll be the protagonist, and then there’ll be the wife, and then the mistress.” In Bad Sisters, “it’s so nice to see women, like, being there – and being completely themselves, around other women.”

In season two, that sibling dynamic drives the plot as the Garvey sisters, led by Horgan’s character Eva, reckon with the fallout of their brother-in-law’s murder. Given how neatly the first season resolved, some critics questioned the sense in a follow-up, but this time it’s an even better show, smoothing over the split between light and dark and unveiling new depths to the characters.

Hewson agrees. “I thought the storyline and scripts were tighter, and with Sharon knowing us more as people and actors, she really dug into our characters and made them more specific to us as performers.” Becka, for instance, “is not so much the baby any more – she’s more in cahoots with the sisters, which is nice.”

Indeed, from having had no relationship before the show, the cast are now as close as the women they play. They go on holiday together, Hewson says, and share “a million” WhatsApp groups, the names of which “cannot be disclosed”. “In season two, we got even tighter. Now we’re just addicted to each other, in a sick way.”

Hewson’s role inBad Sisters is perhaps so deftly observed because it is not too distant from the world she comes from. She, too, grew up in a big family in Dublin, as the second-eldest of Paul (Bono) and Ali Hewson’s four children. Like Becka, Hewson was “weirdly shy,” she says. “I would hide under tables, and I wore a hoodie, and I sucked my thumb.” Her childhood obsession was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: “I cut off all my hair and made everybody call me Elliott for years.”

In most meaningful ways, Hewson says, she was a “normal Irish teenager”, something she credits to her parents’ commitment to protecting their children’s privacy.

One of Hewson’s younger brothers, Eli, has since gone on to follow their dad into music as the lead singer of the rock band Inhaler. But when the four of them were kids, Hewson says, he and her brother John often chose to stay at home and hang with friends over accompanying U2 on tour. Hewson and their eldest sister Jordan, on the other hand, “fucking lived for it,” she says. “Me and my sister ran that shit. All we had to do was tutoring for a few hours a day, and then we were like Eloise in every hotel, terrorising people – we milked it… we went to every gig, we met every celebrity.” (Who was the most exciting? “Wyclef Jean,” she says, without hesitation.)

Hewson didn’t find the transition in and out of “normal life” particularly difficult; if anything, it was useful preparation for the ups-and-downs of acting, she says. “It feels very normal to me.” Her school friends were good at slotting her back in and catching her up on the gossip. “They never got jealous or made me feel like I was excluded.”

Hewson’s parents were initially wary of her pursuing acting, Hewson says, but trusted her to follow her passion. She learned the ropes from her tutor, an aspiring filmmaker, while on the road with U2, and went on to study at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. “Looking back, I can’t believe how lucky I was that I found the thing that I love so quickly,” she says.

But at first, turning that passion into paid work was “really rough”. “Nobody wanted to take me seriously,” Hewson says. In an interview with Radio Times earlier this year, she said that she considered giving up acting after “being constantly treated like shit” on an unspecified film. “What really frustrated me was no matter what I said, no matter how well I communicated it, it was never taken on board, and then my work suffered,” she says now.

Hewson confesses to having a “massive authority problem” perhaps stemming from always having been heard as a child. “I just don’t really like being told what to do.”

Isn’t that hard, for an actor?

“It’s really hard,” she says, with a deep exhale. “I go to therapy, and I’ve learned how to manage it – but I just don’t really like it if I don’t think someone’s making the right decisions, or people think they know what’s better for me.” When there’s respect on both sides, however, there’s little that Hewson won’t do for a role.

After the first season of Bad Sisters came out, Hewson was roped into the “nepo baby” discourse by a New York Magazine cover story about second-generation celebrities. “[It] kind of did me favours,” Hewson says, as it allowed her to flex some personality in response. While others chafed at the suggestion that they’d inherited their careers, Hewson perfectly trod the line between acknowledging her privilege and poking fun.

She took to X/Twitter (she has since deleted her account), to joke about being “devastated” that she didn’t make the cover – and call out the head of the magazine’s parent company for being a “nepo baby” herself.

“Someone tweeted me like, ‘You just fucked the internet’, and I was like, ‘You know what? I did’,” says Hewson, with satisfaction. She agrees that some “nepo babies” make life harder for themselves by denying the reality, adding, mischievously: “I also think it still has legs because it’s fun to say. It rolls off the tongue.”

She, as you can tell, wasn’t fazed by the scrutiny. “For my whole life, that conversation has always happened: people always have an opinion before I even meet them… because of the way that I’ve been brought into this world, which I don’t have any control over. It’s just always been a part of who I am, I guess.”

It is clear to see the impact of Hewson’s upbringing, beyond the one-dimensional clichés that the “nepo-baby” conversation typically narrows in on: in the ability to advocate for herself on sets, for example, and the creative instincts she feels confident following.

Growing up, Hewson says, she was protected from the perils and temptations of celebrity. “I think ‘inoculated’ is a great way of putting it – you see the truth of it. I really don’t like working with actors who are in it for the fame; it really bothers me.” (It’s obvious, she says, in “how they approach their work”.)

The Bono she knows, she says, is a true eccentric: the comedian of her parents, excellent at doing accents and bits, and “a one-of-a-kind human being”. “I feel very lucky to know him,” Hewson says. “Sometimes I look at him and I’m like, ‘I can’t believe that you exist’… He’s got so much love for the world, and joy, and he’s really funny. I don’t know if people know that side to him.”

She has no aspiration, though, to ever occupy her dad’s level of celebrity. “It’s so much responsibility. He is, like, born for it – but I wouldn’t like to have to walk into a restaurant and have to shake everybody’s hand. It’s just a lot of opinions; a lot of people sizing you up.”

Instead, she says, her own focus is on the work and pushing herself with each role.

“Proving myself to me is more important than to other people.” That approach is paying dividends. Next year Hewson will appear alongside George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern and more heavy-hitters in an as-yet-untitled coming of age comedy from Noah Baumbach. She won’t say more than that it was an “amazing experience”, having dreamed of working with the director ever since The Squid and The Whale: “I don’t want to get into trouble.”

But she raves about the pilot she’s just shot with director Alec Berg (of Barry and Curb Your Enthusiasm), set in the world of Formula 1 and co-starring Murray Bartlett as her estranged father. “It’s a really hilarious comedy, but it also has a beautiful father-daughter dynamic.”

Having made a determined ascent to reach this point in her career, she wants to enjoy it – free champagne and all. “I spent all my 20s worrying, when am I going to get another job? Am I going to get a call back? I haven’t had an audition in weeks – just being kind of on edge,” Hewson says. “And right now I can go: ‘I’m OK’.”

By Elle Hunt
Photography by Laura McCluskey
Source: gq-magazine.co.uk