The anti-Bond: Why Keeley Hawes’ new assassin is the spy we need now

More than two decades ago, actor Keeley Hawes and I met on the set of David Wolstencroft’s television spy thriller Spooks. That series, about a group of intelligence officers working in Section D of the British spy agency MI5, was hailed for the way it upended the established espionage genre.

Since the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953, that franchise had defined the way stories about spies and assassins were told. But if Spooks gave the genre its light and shade, the new thriller series, The Assassin, flips the script again, in favour of something more resembling a rollercoaster.

Freddie Highmore and Keeley Hawes in The Assassin.Credit: Two Brothers/All3Media

“The Assassin feels a bit like the opposite of Bond in every way,” Hawes explains, when we reconnect to talk about the new series. “Julie is a kind of anti-hero. Obviously when we meet her as a young woman she’s obviously been very, very good at her job. But even then, she’s this person who’s a bit sort of worn down with it.

“She is real in a way that James Bond is not,” Hawes adds. “And I think even though they’re so different, both of those shows would appeal to the same sort of person who loves a high-octane show.”

Created by Harry and Jack Williams – the sibling writing partnership behind The Missing and its spinoff Baptiste, Liar and The Tourist – The Assassin is a crime thriller about a retired assassin (Hawes’ Julie) who is living a quiet life on a remote Greek island and trying to reconnect with her son, Edward (Freddie Highmore). The hiccup? Mum’s past has caught up with her.

When Hawes sat down to begin work on the series, the scripts and the story framework were still in an evolutionary state, she says. “So you have an idea of where the show is going to go,” she says. “But then that can change. It is also organic. And particularly with Jack and Harry, there are some curveballs that are thrown.

Freddie Highmore in The Assassin.Credit: Two Brothers/All3Media

“Once you’ve established who the character is, [and] how you’ll play that person, it’s quite exciting to then not know which direction they’re going to go,” Hawes says. “In this case, it just gets more and more exciting. And I just loved the work.

“I know everybody always says this, but this really was a joyful job,” Hawes adds. “Freddie and I had this amazing chemistry from the beginning. I immediately knew that it was going to be OK. We met and had a coffee, and we did the read-through [of the scripts] and I felt like I had known this person for much longer than I have.”

Both Hawes and Highmore shared a disciplined working style, Hawes says. “We both take it very seriously, but we also like to keep it light and have a nice time at work where possible,” she says.

“We’re together for a long time. It’s very intense for five months, and you’re away from your family,” she adds. “So it’s really lovely to find yourself developing these relationships with people who you’ve become very close to very quickly. And it’s a real privilege. That’s a really lovely thing to have come out of a lovely show.”

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the series is the way it layers truth and falsehood on top of one another. It has conventional twists, one of the hallmarks of the genre, but it also has a very Harry and Jack Williams-specific cadence where it tends to pivot in wholly unexpected ways.

In the midst of that, Hawes’ character Julie almost seems like a single point of truth. In the first two episodes at least, as you start to realise other characters may be lying, she seems to largely tell the truth – aside, obviously, from the fact that she has not yet told her son that she is a retired assassin.

“Julie is just really authentic,” Hawes says. “We all know that she’s got a secret. She says, ‘yeah, I’ve got a secret, I’m not going to tell you what the secret is, so move on’. And I love that about her. I think I relate to that, especially the older I get.”

Important too, Hawes says, was not making any judgements on the life her character has lived.

Keeley Hawes says she and Freddie Highmore had an “amazing chemistry from the beginning”.Credit: Two Brothers/All3Media

“Am I sympathetic with Julie? Am I not? That’s the most shattering thing when people are thinking about that character as a real person and the ethics of what they do,” Hawes says. “But I think when you’re an actor, you have to find empathy with whoever you are playing. And I don’t think she sits around thinking, am I good? Are you a baddie? She just is what she is.”

This project, and another, Miss Austen, in which Hawes plays Cassandra Austen, the watercolourist sister of author Jane Austen, saw the 49-year-old actress step into a producing role.

Hawes says the catalyst was working on The Durrells, Simon Nye’s adaptation of Gerald Durrell’s autobiographical books about his family’s time in Greece, “and it happened really quite organically. It was a show where there were lots of young actors, lots of people for whom it was their first job. And I was there as a more seasoned, older actor,” Hawes says.

“I started working much more closely on the production side of things and I found that I really enjoyed it,” Hawes says. “I like that aspect of things. I like working with writers. I like everything that side involves and I felt like I had something to bring actually. So they happily, I believe, took me on as a producer.”

Keeley Hawes in a scene from The Assassin.Credit: Two Brothers/All3Media

On The Assassin, that Hawes knew creators/writers Harry and Jack Williams and their creative team well was a boon because “they are an incredibly collaborative bunch of people. Freddy and I were able to be involved in different conversations, edits and script, and all of those things in which we both have experience.”

The Assassin was also an opportunity for Hawes to put back into use the physical and tactical training she completed for Spooks. “It can become kind of second nature,” she says. “It’s a fun part of my job looking like it’s me that’s throwing that man in the trailer, smashing him into a car and then taking him out.

“It’s not,” she adds, laughing. “We have a lot of people who are there to make us look great. There’s an army of them. They make us look very slick.”

And as for the original Mr Slick himself? Even Bond has benefited from more complex storytelling, Hawes says. “It has become more interesting in recent years when we’ve learned more about the character of Daniel Craig’s Bond,” Hawes says. “We’ve sort of got to know him more as a man.

“What is so interesting to me about The Assassin is that we really know this person,” Hawes adds. “The fact that she’s an assassin is a sort of secondary thing. It’s not her whole being.”

The Assassin premieres on Stan* on Friday, July 25.

* Stan is owned by Nine Entertainment, also the owner of this masthead.

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