Eve Hewson
Eve Hewson is an actor, born 1991.
The parentage is the first line of every profile, so here it is: Hewson is the daughter of the activist Ali Hewson and the singer Bono. The early credits look exactly like what that access tends to buy, small parts in films with famous people in them, Yvonne in Blood Ties, Tess in Enough Said, a first significant role in This Must Be the Place in 2011.
The Knick settled the question. As the nurse Lucy Elkins she had to hold long scenes opposite a much showier lead performance, and across that series she was repeatedly the most interesting thing in the frame of a show which was not designed to be about her.
The film work since has been mixed more by design than by accident: Carol Donovan in Bridge of Spies, Nennete in Papillon, Marian in the 2018 Robin Hood, Anne Morgan in Tesla. What she does in all of them is refuse to be decorative, which is harder in period costume than it sounds.
Television has served her better. Adele in Behind Her Eyes, Becka Garvey in Bad Sisters, Amelia Sacks in The Perfect Couple: three very different registers, and the Bad Sisters part in particular found a comic looseness nothing before it had asked her for. Then Flora and Son in 2023, where she takes the title role, sings, and manages to be abrasive, funny and sad in roughly equal measure. That is the performance to judge her on.
Movies (13)
TV (5)
Where to start with Eve Hewson
Flora and Son is the one, and it is not close. She carries a small Irish comedy about a mother trying to be less bad at it, plays the whole thing without a scrap of vanity, and sings.
Next, Bad Sisters, where she is the most chaotic of the siblings and takes most of the laughs, then The Knick, the serious early work and still the best-directed thing she has appeared in.
For the films, Bridge of Spies and Robin Hood mark the two extremes of studio casting she has had, one restrained and excellent, the other a costume part in a film that does not deserve her. Behind Her Eyes is the addictive one, best watched knowing nothing at all, The Perfect Couple is the glossy beach-read version of the same idea, and This Must Be the Place is where all of it started.