Keeley Hawes: TV's toughest detective

One of the downsides to being Keeley Hawes is getting pulled over by the police. At the end of last year, for instance, she was buying a burrito in Covent Garden when a burly squad in full blue serge piled out of a riot-proofed patrol van to confront her.

‘It looked like I was a major terrorist,’ she laughs. ‘But then they said, “Can we get a picture?” They all got out their handcuffs and posed. Eventually one said, “Come on, we’re going to lose our jobs.” ’ She laughs again. ‘Having said that, this was after Ashes to Ashes and before Line of Duty. I wonder what would happen now…’

It’s easy to see why the boys in blue love Keeley — she’s been adding glamour to the force as Zoe Reynolds in Spooks, Alex ‘Bollyknickers’ Drake in Ashes to Ashes and DSI Martha Lawson in ITV’s Identity. However, as the twisted, lonely DI Lindsay Denton in Line of Duty… well, not so much.

Line of Duty is all about dodgy cops — Jed Mercurio’s internal investigations thriller follows a fictional anti-corruption unit. Denton was its target in this year’s second season, suspected of having set up her colleagues in a fatal ambush. As suspicions mounted, Denton was bogwashed and beaten up by fellow officers, thrown in jail where wardens and inmates did the same, all along protesting her innocence and uncovering even bigger scandals. In terms of water-cooler moments, Line of Duty ranks alongside The Honourable Woman and The Fall as part of the new wave of Brit TV that’s finally making US producers jealous again.

And Hawes — like Maggie Gyllenhaal and Gillian Anderson in Woman and The Fall — was a revelation. She evoked such energy and raw emotion that even the disparaging TV critic AA Gill has put her among our best actresses, alongside Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.

Today, however, she’s just a 38-year-old Londoner. We meet at an outdoor restaurant near Richmond Park on one of the last sunny days of summer. She rummages through the menu, wondering about the healthy options. ‘I’ve got a shoot in a minute,’ she explains, before quickly adding, ‘I don’t feel the pressure any more, though. I honestly don’t give a shit. Two days of dieting isn’t going to happen. I have a ten-year-old daughter and I’ve got far too much responsibility to be seen to be picking around with bits of food.’

Who knew Keeley Hawes was a laugh? Any fears of an ice queen quickly melt away as she riffs on her Marylebone upbringing — riding around her council estate on the back of her brother’s Chopper, playing run-outs, and her mum shouting, ‘Dinner!’ across the blocks. Her dad and her two older brothers are cab drivers and she grew up near the Lisson Grove Estate, in a block that’s since become luxury flats.

If her accent seems a little crisp for a cabbie’s daughter, she points out, ‘I came from Central London, I wasn’t Cockney — my mother made sure we put the Ts on the end of words, and then I went to drama school.’ She pauses. ‘I do sound slightly posher, but listen, I’ve just been working with Tom Hiddleston and I feel very, very London talking to him.’

A combination of primary- school plays and a love of TV — ‘I was into Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons and, weirdly, those black and white Bollywood movies on Channel 4’ — inspired a love of acting. Living over the road from the Sylvia Young Theatre School helped, where she studied with Emma Bunton and most of All Saints — Melanie Blatt, she says, was glamorous even then: ‘Quite beautiful and French-looking, even in school uniform.’

Although the internet has it that she was spotted by a modelling agency while working in a casino, she was actually approached on the street while doing work experience at Cosmopolitan and then spent a year flitting from photoshoots to music videos. ‘It was a long time ago,’ she says. ‘I was 17. It was fun — but I’m not the model type. I wasn’t terribly thin, for one thing.’

Certainly it was more her inner-city upbringing than her catwalk posing that set her up for Line of Duty. Although she had a stunt double for most of a lengthy waterboarding sequence, she took plenty of the punishment herself. She threw all her own punches — ‘I’m actually quite handy’ — and genuinely had her head stuffed down a toilet. ‘You can’t really pretend to be bogwashing someone, so he held my hair and that hurt — but we only did it twice, at the end of the day, and it was quite cooling…’

She had a personal understanding of and deep connection to her character, she admits. ‘She’s depressed, and I know what that’s like,’ she says, a reference to the depression that has haunted her since she was 17. It’s a chemical imbalance, she explains, that she’s managed since but which she always has to be aware of. It’s oddly reassuring, and it humanises her enormously, when she explains her self-doubt, being unhappy despite having a famous husband (fellow Spooks actor Matthew Macfadyen), three kids and a good job. To a degree, it’s the modern condition — depression and anxiety have been on the rise for the past few years, with young Londoners especially at risk.

‘There’s this notion that if you’re perceived to be vaguely presentable, you’re not allowed to be unhappy,’ she explains. ‘It couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s awful.’

What pulls us from this fragile moment is the mention of Doctor Who. In a casting that came, surprisingly, from her turn as frumpy Denton, she’s now donning black dresses, blood-red lipstick and armour-piercing heels as Ms Delphox — in Steven Moffat’s words, ‘the greatest villain yet on Doctor Who — a banker’. She laughs at his description. ‘My character runs the most secure bank in the universe, and there’s a wonderful scene where you see the wealthiest people in the universe walking around on this huge set...’ She lights up like a genuine fan. ‘It reminded me of the bar scene in Star Wars — they all looked so brilliant, in crazy outfits. I appear with my monster, called the Teller, some poor dude sweating away in a costume… it’s very funny but it’s quite dark.’

While she was filming her episode, a woman approached Peter Capaldi with her five-year-old daughter, who was dressed as a Dalek. The girl was autistic and finding it difficult to accept a new Doctor as she’d gone on so many adventures with Matt Smith. Capaldi knelt down and scrolled through pictures on his phone, showing her a snap of him with Smith and Jenna Coleman. ‘They think it’s OK for me to be the Doctor,’ he said softly, ‘So I hope you think it would be OK for me to be the Doctor, too...’ Keeley tears up a little as she tells the story. ‘That encapsulates everything about being in Doctor Who — he was in almost every scene, working so hard, but you can’t say, “I haven’t got time for you, Dalek child.” I don’t think you can ever switch off.’

Hawes met Macfadyen while filming Spooks, shortly after she had married cartoonist Spencer McCallum, her long-term boyfriend and father of her elder son, Myles, 14. Any ill feelings have long been smoothed over — when I ask about hanging out with famous friends, she shrugs. ‘I have a couple of lovely friends, my husband and my ex-husband. When there are children involved you just have to do it.’ With Macfadyen she has two children — Maggie, ten, and Ralph, seven, who are finally appreciating their mother’s career now that she’s in Doctor Who and something by JK Rowling, albeit a BBC/HBO version of her grown-up novel The Casual Vacancy rather than Harry Potter.

She’s almost as pleased about this herself — indeed, she’s still a little hungover after some overexcited drinking with her co-star and former Miss Marple Julia McKenzie. ‘I’ve only just started filming, while they’ve all nearly finished — so I had some catching up to do and I had a few too many…’ she sighs. ‘Since I turned 35 it takes me two or three days to get over a hangover.’

Next up there’s The Hollow Crown, the second part of the BBC’s ambitious attempt to screen all of Shakespeare’s history plays. She’s playing Queen Elizabeth in Henry VI part 2 and Richard III, alongside Benedict Cumberbatch and, terrifyingly, Judi Dench. ‘I haven’t done Shakespeare and I’ve told them I can’t do Shakespeare and they still employed me.’ She seems amazed. ‘We’re rehearsing and I feel like I’m in safe hands, but still… I mean, I’ll be doing it with Judi Dench…’

She trails off, looking genuinely worried, so I leaf through my notes, pull out the AA Gill quote comparing her to Dench and read it to her: ‘Hawes is one of a number of very good female actors we have, from Judi Dench and Maggie Smith down,’ I read. She is momentarily stunned, then her face flushes a deep, deep crimson and she stares at her hands.

‘Well, that’s ridiculous,’ she mumbles. ‘I mean, I don’t even know what to say about that…’ and then she thinks it through. ‘Although he doesn’t say exactly how far down, does he?’ and she looks up, her impish grin returning. ‘I’d say it was fairly far down — but I’d still put that in a frame…’ When it’s time for her to leave, I make a joke about her receiving an honour to match Maggie and Judi and she turns back briefly — ‘Dame Keeley…? I can’t quite hear a copper calling me that.’

Doctor Who is on BBC One Saturday night at 7.30pm