Irish actress Eve Hewson proves being funny comes easy when playing Irish characters in "Flora and Son" and "Bad Sisters."
Hewson, 32, nearly didn't get the role of Flora, a Dublin mum who tries to learn the guitar while attempting to connect to her sullen teenage son (Orén Kinlan).
Director John Carney ("Once") initially thought she was too "poised and elegant" for the "earthy" role, but Hewson, who knew the former Irish musician through her father (U2's Bono), convinced him to give her a chance at the role.
“I read it and I knew her,” Hewson revealed to The Wrap.
“I grew up in Dublin. I know Dublin girls, I am a Dublin girl. It was an instant feeling of, I have to play her.”
During a meeting, which took place over a Zoom call, Hewson told him her impressions of the character, which didn't always match up to Carney's idea of Flora.
“I would say, ‘This scene is really funny,’ and he’d say, ‘No, that scene is sad.’ We argued about where the humor was in the story, and then the next day I got the part," said Hewson.
Carney says Hewson was "immediately really funny."
“She was like, ‘You’ve written a comedy.’ And I said, ‘No I haven’t,’ because I consider myself a great highbrow filmmaker.
“She was like, ‘No, no no! It’s funny and wrong and cheeky and salty, and I want to lean into all of that and not pull back and do a polite version of her. I will make a fool of myself, I don’t care who you think I am or who the world thinks I am. I want to get laughs and I want to identify with the character and I don’t care how I do it.’
"There was something rockstar about that, in a way.”
Speaking of rock stars, as the daughter of famed U2 frontman Bono, Hewson has been around music her entire life. Her choice to pursue acting, she jokes, make her something of a "black sheep" in her family.
“Everybody else in the family played music and sang and wrote songs, and I was off studying my lines and reading monologues,” she said. “They didn’t understand me at all.”
But in “Flora and Son,” Hewson not only sang and played guitar on screen, she also cowrote a couple of songs. She and costar Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who plays Flora's guitar teacher) collaborated with the film's composer Gary Clark on songs for their characters, and Hewson ended up with writing credits on the songs “Meet in the Middle” and “High Life.”
“I’ve had lots of conversations with my girlfriends lately where I’ve said, ‘Can you believe I’m in this movie singing and playing guitar and writing songs? Can you believe I ended up here?” she said.
Hewson has also proven her comedic range in Sharon Horgan’s Irish black comedy series “Bad Sisters,” where Hewson plays Becca, the troubled youngest sister of the Garvey clan.
Hewson, who previously starred in more serious and darker roles such as in “The Knick" and "Behind Her Eyes," says her recent roles have allowed people in the film industry to see her range.
"For a long time, people saw me in one way,” she said. “People who knew me would say, ‘You’re so funny, you should be in comedies!’ But I never got to read for them, because nobody saw me that way until ‘Bad Sisters’ and ‘Flora’ .... Until I got to play Irish characters.
“Now that things are going well, I have these moments when I remember walking into audition rooms and feeling completely invisible. And now I feel seen for the first time.”
"Flora and Son" and "Bad Sisters" are both streaming on Apple TV+.
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