In August 2008, Keeley stared alongisde Marc Warren and Alexander Armstrong in the BBC comedy drama, Mutual Friends.
Interview
Keeley returns as unfaithful blonde in new comedy-drama
KEELEY Hawes has an almost Madonna-like way of reinventing herself.
From a mousey-bobbed MI5 agent in Spooks to a time-travelling cop with an 80s perm in Ashes To Ashes, she manages to pull off any guise with style.
These days, for a starring role in her latest show Mutual Friends, she’s sporting long blonde locks.
“The Ashes hair was huge, but this still takes an hour and a half!” she fumes, flipping it up to show it isn’t all hers.
In her latest TV incarnation Keeley plays Jen, the unfaithful wife of Hustle star Marc Warren’s Martin.
There’s not a police badge in sight in this comedy-drama, which follows the trials and tribulations of the 40-something couple as they recover from the suicide of Martin’s best friend Carl – Jen’s former lover – and try for a baby.
“We meet them at a time when they’re not particularly happy. They’ve got this son Dan, but Jen would like another baby,” Keeley explains.
“They do love each and they could be very happy, but they just get on each others’ nerves. And she’s been having an affair with his best friend, which is never going to go down that well. So they’ve got a long way to go to repair their relationship and recover from that.
“The crux of their problems is that she thinks the grass is greener and it’s not really. Carl tops himself, so it couldn’t have been that great could it?” Keeley adds with a sardonic laugh.
“But she doesn’t really feel guilty, none of them feel guilt. I think they’re all too selfish really. In life we are all fairly selfish to a degree and this just points it out.”
Mother-of-three Keeley turned 32 this year and admits it was ‘slightly odd’ playing an older woman struggling with her biological clock.
“In the script, I keep saying things like ‘I think I might have left it too late’, and Marc says things like, ‘You know Jen, we’re in our 40s’. “I have taken it up with the writers,” she giggles before admitting that “I do have to use anti-ageing cream, I’m there!”
Besides suicide and infidelity, the six-parter tackles the ever-present subject of fertility problems.
“Jen and Martin opt for IVF treatment because he’s got weak sperm and she also doesn’t really want to have sex with him, so she thinks it would be easier that way,” Keeley says.
“It’s such a brilliant subject to cover, so many people go through it,” she continues. “I do have friends who do IVF and they’re all kind of late 30s and 40s, so I feel I can play that.
“And it’s quite good to cover it in a comedy, humorous way. We’re not laughing at it, but there’s a lot of comedy to be had in it.”
The elegant actress reveals she did have to spend an afternoon in stirrups, while ‘some poor actor’ had to inspect her nether regions.
“I’m passed being embarrassed about all that,” she says breezily before adding that “I did have bicycle shorts on underneath my operating gown to save someone’s blushes.”
The show started life as a one-off pilot filmed before Keeley joined Ashes To Ashes. Unusually for a brand new drama, the BBC liked it so much that it was immediately commissioned for a full series and the 60-minute episode never even aired.
“I had wanted to work with Marc and it had all the right ingredients. “So I was thrilled when it went to series because it was so nice,” Keeley says.
The Mutual Friends cast includes Alexander Armstrong of Armstrong And Miller fame, who plays Martin’s annoyingly confident friend Patrick.
Keeley says they’ve all become friends during the shoot – and enjoy a bit of Marc-baiting once the cameras have stopped rolling.
“He’s so easy to tease, because he’s so gullible,” she says.
“But I can’t tell you what we tease him about because it would all embarrass him.”
Keeley will be back wearing her 1980s perm in September when she starts filming on the second series of Ashes To Ashes.
After 14-hour days, six days a week on Mutual Friends, she’s looking forward to the five-day shoots for Ashes.
There’s no chance of a sneak preview of what to expect however – she insists the plot is still a closely-guarded secret.
The follow-up to the award-winning 1970s-set cop drama Life On Mars sees chauvinistic DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) come to terms with a new sidekick in feisty Alex Drake, who wakes up in 1981 after being shot in 2008.
There is also an undeniable sexual chemistry between the pair.
“We’re always the last to know the plot,” Keeley moans.
“I’d like to see Gene and Alex get together just to shut people up so they stop asking me about it!
“But I don’t know if that would be a good thing, just to get it out the way and move on or leave it hanging.
“I know that it’s moving to 1982, so Alex will have been there a bit and chilled out more. But that’s all I know!”
The series pulled in viewing figures of around seven million when it started in February. Keeley admits mixed reception from the critics felt like a ‘punch in the face’.
“It really is the least of my worries,” she adds defiantly.
“I’ve had such a good response from the public, it’s made it all worth it.”
Having said that, Keeley admits people initially shouted at her in the street.
“They were saying things like, ‘Stop being so horrible to Gene Hunt!’ It was hilarious!” she says, giggling.
“Then people mellowed and they were writing letters saying, ‘It’s the first time in 10 years I’ve sat down to watch something with my family’. It appealed to so many people.”
She’s so busy on the small screen, it’s a wonder Keeley finds time to bring up her three children with the help of her second husband and former Spooks co-star Matthew MacFadyen.
“You can’t plan anything when you do what we do and there’s something quite lovely about doing a series like Ashes, because you do know where you’ll be and what you’ll be doing. That’s quite unusual,” she says.
“But you have to be quite relaxed because you can’t plan things like summer holidays.
“We just kind of make it up as we go along and try and give the children a structure.
“But I wouldn’t want a nine-to-five existence.”
London-born Keeley has an eight-year-old son with cartoonist Spencer McCallum, who she married in December 2001. The pair separated soon after, when Keeley fell for then co-star Matthew.
They tied the knot in 2004 and have a daughter Maggie, three, and Ralph, who turns two this year.
“Ralph’s great – his new word is Valerie, singing VALERIEEEE! If anybody else tries to sing it, he goes, ‘No Valerie!’,” Keeley giggles, clearly smitten.
With two showbiz parents you’d think a career in acting beckons for her children, but Keeley’s not so sure.
“I don’t know. They’re still at the stage of picking up snails and eating them, so I don’t know what they’re going to do.”
As for Keeley, she may be about to reinvent herself again as a Hollywood siren after she recently starred alongside ‘sexy’ Daniel Craig in Flashbacks Of A Fool and appeared in British flick The Bank Job earlier this year.
“Who know? It’s all a bit crazy. I’ve got to do more Ashes first before I think about doing anything else,” she says.
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