Being cast in the mini-series “Miss Austen” began Keeley Hawes’s first venture into the Jane Austen-verse. Hawes has a résumé thick with period pieces but, perhaps surprisingly, she had never done a screen adaptation of Austen’s work — a veritable cottage industry in Britain since the late 1930s.
“Of course, my husband played Mr. Darcy, so I feel like we’ve been in that world,” Hawes said, referring to the “Succession” star Matthew Macfadyen, who appeared in the 2005 film version of the classic Regency-era novel “Pride and Prejudice.”
“I was delighted to join in the Austen world, and especially to do it like this because it’s not one that has been done,” she continued. “But it feels like part of the canon.”
Indeed, Hawes is sneaking in through a side door: In the four-part “Miss Austen,” which premieres on Sunday as part of the PBS series “Masterpiece,” she plays a fictionalized version of Cassandra, Jane’s older sister and a somewhat controversial figure because she burned most of the writer’s letters.
Like the historical novel by Gill Hornby on which it is based, the show, adapted by Andrea Gibb, speculates on what led Cassandra to her fateful act and features some very Austen-like romantic subplots. A key development cleverly brings together a friend of Cassandra’s played by Rose Leslie and Jane’s posthumous novel “Persuasion.”
Though less known to mainstream viewers in the United States, Hawes, 49, has long been a familiar presence in British living rooms, with roles dating to the late 1980s. Her greatest hits are almost exclusively from television — in 2021, she was anointed “the queen of British telly” by The London Standard — starting in an era when, as she put it, “people could be quite snobby about TV.”
“Yes, I bided my time,” she added dryly during a recent visit to New York. “Now we live in a world where Meryl Streep does TV shows and Robert De Niro is on posters for a TV show.”
Given her immense range and versatility, and her near constant churn, Hawes is, in many respects, still a character actor at heart, a proper trouper with a decided lack of pretension or preciousness about the work. And yet over the past decade, she has emerged as an in-demand star with the requisite presence to carry a series. Her role as Cassandra is the latest example: a part that is both unshowy and commanding.
“She’s been a very, very important part of a lot of great ensembles,” Christine Langan, an executive producer of “Miss Austen,” said in a recent video call. “But she also has total lead-actress capacity. Her face as Miss Austen has become so symbolic of the show.”
Hawes spent 10 years at the Sylvia Young Theater School in London, where she enrolled at age 9. (Classmates included the future Spice Girl Emma Bunton, better known as Baby Spice.) Her screen appearances quickly began piling up. For someone who would become a defining face of British television, it made sense that she would turn up in music videos for era-defining bands of the Britpop music craze, including Pulp, Suede and James.
Her breakthrough came in the early 2000s, with the three-episode historical drama “Tipping the Velvet” and the espionage series “Spooks” (retitled “MI-5” in the United States), on whose set she met Macfadyen. Major roles since then include a prickly detective in the procedural “Line of Duty,” a warmly charismatic 1930s matriarch in “The Durrells in Corfu,” and a calculating, ambitious home secretary in the sexy Netflix thriller “Bodyguard.”
“I have been watching and admiring Keeley for so many years now,” Leslie said in an email. “I first saw her onscreen in ‘Spooks’ and she had always struck me as an incredibly versatile and brilliant actor,” adding that when she decided to sign up for “Miss Austen,” “the opportunity to work opposite her was a ginormous pull.”
If there is one constant in Hawes’s career, it’s that she works constantly. When asked what she had wrapped before starting “Miss Austen,” Hawes froze.
“Oh, my God,” she said. A pause. “Actually, I can’t remember. I did then go on to do ‘The Assassin’ for Amazon,” she continued, referring to a thriller due later this year in which she portrays a retired killer with a son played by Freddie Highmore.
“It’s a glossy assassin, is what I would say,” she added with a laugh. “I’m shooting people because I have to for my own survival, not because I’m enjoying it.”
Her newly announced next project is yet another hairpin turn: Hawes will star as a nun in love with a priest played by Paapa Essiedu in a coming Channel 4 drama from Jack Thorne (“Adolescence”).
Hawes seems to relish the whiplash — maybe because she is not, as she said, “a Method actor — I’m able to remove myself completely.” The continuous pivoting between vastly different roles also makes it hard for her to be pigeonholed.
“What you get with Keeley is someone who’s really all about the character and all about serving the character and isn’t going to get hung up on things that maybe other actors would be insecure about,” Jed Mercurio, the creator of “Line of Duty” and “Bodyguard,” said in a video interview. “She doesn’t have that insecurity because she knows she can execute.”
Mercurio alludes to a certain quality of effectiveness and capability, which is also found in Cassandra Austen, a character whose mother describes her as having “a surfeit of competence.” Hawes was quick to laugh off the suggestion that this reflected her own personality. “I really think it’s something people see in me,” she said, “because I never think I know what I’m doing.”
Yet she sounded a little different a few minutes later as she described her growing taste for working behind the scenes. (“My husband can’t think of anything worse,” she joked.) She created her own television production company, Buddy Club, in 2019 (credits include the mini-series “Honour” and “Crossfire”), and she is an executive producer of “Miss Austen,” which Masterpiece commissioned and co-produced. (It was broadcast in Britain by the BBC.)
“I want things to be smooth,” Hawes said. “I like to organize the hell out of everything. It’s quite difficult. I’m not controlling, I don’t think, but I like to have a certain amount of control.”
In person, she has an allure and charm that feel timeless, which may help explain why she is equally convincing in both period and contemporary works. Watching her go through the glamorous monotony of a photo shoot, it felt as if Nora Charles from “The Thin Man” had somehow beamed into a modern Manhattan loft.
“She’s very, very elegant and striking, beautiful, but she can really shape-shift — time, social levels,” Langan said. “She’s like a strong liquid, like mercury.”
Langan added: “She’s just so kind of capable in so many different ways that she disappears into her roles.”
Yet if Hawes is on some level chameleonic, she manages also to eschew both the showy parts (no prosthetics, no gaining or losing huge amounts of weight) and the pseudo-humble roles that beg attention to their modesty. Her performances tend to lean on intimacy and small details. In “Miss Austen,” for example, Cassandra keeps her feelings close. Her main expression is a tight, controlled smile that might mean “You beast!” in one scene, and “Do go on” in another.
Asked to elaborate on technique, though, Hawes is good at deflecting. She said that portraying Cassandra was “so much fun” and then turned immediately to discussing her castmates. “The playing of any character is much more about what the other actors are doing,” she said. “So much of acting is listening and reacting to the other people in the scenes.”
An actress might be inclined to start thinking about legacy after decades on screens. Given that Hawes’s career is still building momentum, it is perhaps unsurprising that she looks at sources close to home when considering her own. Her character Cassandra — and by extension “Miss Austen” — is deeply concerned with ideas about the things we leave behind: How will her family be remembered? What is a successful life?
Hawes had an immediate answer to this line of inquiry. For some people, legacy might mean their work, while for others it might mean something entirely different, she said. For her, it was “having children.” She has three, the oldest of whom is an elementary schoolteacher.
“That feels like my legacy, I suppose,” she said. “Anything can be your legacy.”
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