The Garvey clan - (from left) Bibi (Sarah Greene), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Eva (Sharon Horgan), Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) and Becka (Eve Hewson) - returns for a second season of Bad Sisters.
If Eve Hewson needs to bury a body, she knows who to call. And it’s not Sharon Horgan or any of her TV siblings from the show Bad Sisters.
“My little brother John,” says Hewson. “I’m sure he’s buried a few bodies. Honestly, we don’t know what he gets up to. He definitely knows the right people. We’re a good pair. We get up to some good stuff together. [Third youngest] Eli’s too sweet. He would have too many morals about it. And my older sister [Jordan] would be like, ‘I can’t show up, I’ve got plans.’”
The Irish actor – yes, let’s get this out of the way, she’s the daughter of U2’s Bono, aka Paul Hewson – stars in the raucous Irish dramedy about a group of sisters and their attempts to knock off their abusive brother-in-law JP, aka the Prick. Family matters, in other words, on and off screen.
“He’s big, he plays rugby, he’s a strong man,” Hewson says of her youngest brother, who she decides would be good with a shovel.
Eve Hewson has been steadily building a career away from her famous family name.Credit: © Ellius Grace / Headpress
The 33-year-old is talking over Zoom from London about the show’s popularity in Ireland, where viewing parties were held across the country and resulted in her being mobbed on the street.
“It’s massive,” says Hewson. “I got attacked by a bunch of schoolgirls once when I went down to my local shop to buy some sausages, and they were all just like, ‘Ahhhhh’, like screaming. I was like, ‘Oh my god.’
“It was really terrifying because it was my local town, so I was like, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ But also really unexpected people in America [have come up to me]. I was shooting there, and lovely little grannies at the supermarket were like, ‘Are you that girl from that show, that sister show?’ And I was like, wow, people are watching it everywhere.”
The Garvey sisters are still in trouble in season two of Bad Sisters.
Created by Horgan, who adapted it from the Belgian series Clan, Bad Sisters’ first season in 2022 was a cracking hit, the kind that generated urgent “you-must-watch-this-show” pleading from everyone who had seen it. Critics agreed – the series won best drama at both the Irish Film and TV awards and the BAFTAs, as well as a prestigious Peabody award. It also picked up four nominations at the 2023 Emmys, including an outstanding actor nod for Horgan.
What made Bad Sisters stand out was the chaotic energy between the Garvey girls – Eva (Horgan), Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), Bibi (Sarah Greene), Ursula (Eva Birthistle) and Becka (Hewson). Sure, you might not have wanted to plot a murder with them, but you could easily sit down and have a cup of tea and a good gossip.
And that is exactly what it is like on set, says Hewson.
Becka (Eve Hewson) and Bibi (Sarah Greene) in season two of Bad Sisters.
“We’re so comfortable with each other and that we know each other’s personalities,” says Hewson. “There’s just a lot more high jinks and fun happening on set. And we talk a lot in the morning; we need at least two hours to tell each other our gossip before we start shooting. It’s like, ‘OK, guys, rolling.’ We’re like, ‘No. And then he said, and I said’, and then they’re like, ‘Girls, we’re rolling.’ We’re very, very, very close, very close. There’s a lot of laughing.”
For season two, which neatly picks up two years later, the Garveys are a little older, wiser and more in trouble than before, especially considering they’re carting a body around in a car boot. And where Claes Bang was chilling as the abusive JP, this time it’s Fiona Shaw, who plays Angelica, a nosy woman from church, they have to deal with. To top it off, the police have reopened the case into JP’s “accidental death” after another body in a suitcase is discovered.
Not that Hewson had any idea what Horgan had planned.
Sharon Horgan (left), Sarah Greene and Anne-Marie Duff in Bad Sisters. Season two looks at the aftermath of trauma.
“I hadn’t a clue,” says Hewson. “She didn’t tell me anything. And then I found out part of my storyline because people were auditioning for the boyfriend, the new boyfriend, and so all of London, all of the actors that I know were all auditioning to play him, and they knew more about the storyline than I did, so that’s how I found out.”
She didn’t get Horgan on the phone and ask what was going on? “I texted Sharon and was like, ‘What is happening?’ I trust her so much that I didn’t feel like I needed to investigate what she was up to. I knew it was going to be good.”
Bad Sisters creator Sharon Horgan is a “powerhouse”, says co-star Eve Hewson.
Good is almost an understatement. Over nearly 20 years, Horgan’s name has been a byword for female-forward television, first with her twenty-something-girls-on-the-town black comedy Pulling and then Catastrophe, an even bleaker and funnier take on marriage and parenthood.
With Bad Sisters, Horgan again puts the female experience first– there’s talk of egg donations, menopause coaches and the appropriate number of salmon to order for a wedding (always too much). It also reflects on the aftermath of trauma and the long-lasting effects of an abusive relationship.
“She’s just a force of nature,” says Hewson of Horgan. “I mean, every morning she’s in the hair and make-up trailer rewriting scripts and scenes and doing a thousand different things. And that’s her energy throughout the day. She never lets up. And she’s always reimagining things and rethinking things, and she always knows her lines. Which is really insane. It’s just like an unbelievable force to watch. Very inspiring.”
Is writing something Hewson could see herself doing?
“I don’t really like writing,” she says, laughing. “A blank page scares me. I’ve read my old diaries back, and I’m like, ‘Oh, god, that is not a talent of mine’, but maybe directing.”
As youngest sister Becka, Hewson is a delightful standout, holding her own against a formidable Horgan and Duff – just as she did against Nicole Kidman in Netflix’s campy murder mystery The Perfect Couple this year. She is also set as the lead in the upcoming comedy Downforce, which has been described as “Formula 1 meets Entourage” and is executive produced by Australian racing champ Daniel Ricciardo.
“I really enjoy doing comedy, and so I have geared myself a little bit towards that,” she says. “And then some things sort of just like happen, and they’re amazing. They choose you. It’s just a very exciting thing to get meetings with people that you never thought you could meet. And people are looking at me in a different way. And it’s nice to not worry too much. Whereas, usually, you’re like, ‘Oh my god, you need a job. Oh my god, oh my god.’ You get really scared that you’ll never work again. So I’m trying to not worry about it.”
That the daughter of one of the most famous singers on the planet is worried she’ll never work again is testament to Hewson’s independence. Sure, the family connection does get brought up in interviews (sorry!), but she does generally fly under the celebrity radar and even joked about being left out of New York magazine’s 2022 nepo baby list (“Actually pretty devastated I’m not featured in the nepo baby article like haven’t they seen my hit show Bad Sisters??? The NERVE”, she wrote on Twitter.)
“It’s so nice,” she says of being recognised for her work and not her family name. “You always want to have your own value. It’s a good feeling.”
And while she does a “lot of peeing and puking” this season, Hewson was also literally thrown in the deep end, aka the freezing English Channel.
“I was like, ‘Why are we doing this?’” says Hewson. “I had to wear an entire wetsuit underneath my jeans, over this big knit jumper, which made it basically impossible to swim through the horrific waves. Then the rescue team couldn’t rescue me because the waves were so choppy, and I was just like stuck in the water, shivering. It’s so unnecessarily cold, I really would like us to shoot somewhere else. We need to go to Australia.”
Until that happens, Hewson has happily swapped Dublin’s colder climes for the sunshine of Los Angeles. “I moved home for the pandemic,” she says. “And I spent a lot of time there, and I shot Bad Sisters there, and I shoot a lot at home. So I was like, I actually need to leave the nest and go plant my flag somewhere that’s not at my mum’s house because I’ve been living there in my 30s for too long.”
Bad Sisters is now streaming on Apple TV+.
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