The daunting task Eve Hewson faced when she first read John Carney’s script Flora and son was accepted before she even realized it.
She was certainly familiar with Carney’s work and almost exclusively delivered features that embedded music into the fabric of their construction. She saw Glen Hansard’s neck shake on Carney’s debut. Once; Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo make sweet music together Start from scratch; Ferdia Walsh-Peelo loves 80s pop street singing. She knew what was going to happen, but still hoped it would never happen.
She fell madly in love with Flora, a single mother who lived with her delinquent teenage son Max in an apartment building in Dublin. She turned each page as Flora took a guitar out of a case, cleaned it and gave it to Max. She followed her when the character started taking guitar lessons on Zoom from a dreamy American named Jeff, whom Flora couldn’t resist flirting with. After getting as far as developing the script, she decided to try out for the role. Hewson therefore hoped with naive optimism that Flora could be the silent guitarist in this man’s rock band. But then…
“Then she started singing,” Hewson groaned, rolling his eyes. “Oh no!”
Memphis Eve Sunny Day Iris Hewson likes to say she is the daughter of hippies. That explains the name, she laughs. Her debut role in The 27 Club In 2008, when she was still a teenager, she took her to the Tribeca Film Festival and got herself an agent. This led to parts in This must be the place with director Paolo Sorrentino, Enough said with Nicole Holofcener and Bridge of Spies with Steven Spielberg.
She grew up in a musical family – her father played professionally in a small Irish band called U2 – and she loved music. By the time she was born, her father’s band had developed relatively well to become the biggest in the music scene, and she benefited from a rich upbringing with her three siblings. She took piano lessons, learned drums and guitar and always assumed that music would be her path.
If music was the obvious calling, drama was the hobby… until it wasn’t. Her acting teacher Erica Dunton was also a filmmaker and made a number of no-budget features for which she hired 15-year-old Hewson. The 27 Club. She spent two weeks in North Carolina shooting the film and something clicked. “I immediately fell in love with acting,” she says. “I knew I wanted to study acting and go to university for that.”
Guitar lessons fell by the wayside – she had never been a fan of the instrument – and music in general fell into the background. But her parents told her she could only apply to the drama school; their other decisions would have to be purely academic. “Basically, they said, ‘Good luck.'”
In a bold move, Hewson decided that she would choose the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts at NYU as her acting school; not exactly a safety school. “I had to do two monologues for my audition, and I remember literally doing it in my dreams months in advance,” she says. “I thought if I messed it up, I was messed up. “I will never be able to move to New York and go to college.” I swallowed my nerves, rushed to the audition and went home and threw up all night. The nerves returned. I learned that I perform well under pressure; The fear comes only after that.”
This quality of Hewson’s helped her get over the hurdle when it came to Flora’s frustrating insistence on singing along to Carney’s script. “I felt if I had said no to the meeting because I was afraid to sing, what an idiot I would have been?” she said.
She met Carney about Zoom, approved the role, liked him so much that she became even more determined to play the part and was afraid to tell him she didn’t think she could sing. He gave her the role the next day. “I said to myself, ‘You know what? Does not matter. I’m going to find out how to sing. It’s going to be okay.’”
Before filming, she rented an Airbnb in Los Angeles, bought a guitar and began vocal training. She worked on getting in shape for two months and it boosted her confidence. “But it was funny, John and I didn’t even really talk about the role the whole time. Finally I thought, ‘Should we rehearse?’ And we decided, ‘No, let’s have a few meals and then start filming.’
Then momentum became their forerunner. “It took five weeks during filming jump in. “Don’t think about what you did today, think about what you’re going to do tomorrow. ‘Do it, don’t doubt yourself.’ And then I think: ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ What’s going to happen?’ It took me about six months to see the film that I thought would end my career and was possibly the worst thing I had ever done.
Hewson uses John Carney’s approach to filmmaking to explain her own lack of confidence in her musical talents. He describes his films as wobbly, like a chair with only three legs. Full of character and sweet, but far from perfect. “Flora and son It feels completely imperfect and I love it,” says Hewson. “It feels chaotic, like an emotional outburst. It feels like history has unwillingly emerged from him. So Flora doesn’t have to be a perfect singer.”
As anyone who has seen the film and heard the soundtrack can attest, both Hewson and Carney are humble. Forced to believe in herself a little, she reluctantly admits: “I really love my voice now. It was such a psychological thing in my head that it was the one thing I would never do, but I just completely ruled out the possibility. So it’s strange – and actually important to me – that it happened to me and I overcame it.”
Since the movie’s debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January, Hewson has heard how good it is Flora and son connected “After shows, women come up to me in tears and say, ‘I’m a single mom and this really touched me.’ I have friends who have always been honest with me about the things I did that they didn’t like, and they were all consumed by it. A friend sent me a video of her and her husband dancing with “ High Life” and “Dublin 07″. It was so much fun.”
Carney invested his cast heavily in shaping the film’s journey, which made Hewson feel more connected to him. “As a director, he’s quite childish,” she says. “When an idea comes to him, he says, ‘Oh, let’s try it.’ He creates an atmosphere where everyone has fun and everyone participates. The whole thing is so playful.”
Half way through Flora and son, she sings a song called “Meet in the Middle” with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Jeff. As the shooting date for the scene approached, she realized she hadn’t been given a song to learn. She interviewed Carney, who told her that she would go into the recording studio with Gordon-Levitt and songwriter Gary Clark to find the song together. “I’ll never forget the day we all got together to write this song,” she says. It was also the first day she met Gordon-Levitt. “It was like we all came together and magic happened. We all met in the middle.”
This stems from Carney’s openness to collaboration, she emphasizes. “You get the best ideas from everyone. Yes, you throw in some bad ideas, but they will not be implemented and we will only use the best of them all. His approach creates the space for this.”
The film establishes that the song does not have a bridge and that a bridge is never found as the plot progresses. It ate away at Clark, who spent the past few weeks trying to get the gang back together to put an end to the whole thing. Everything inside Flora and son is designed for home brewing, but this particular version of Meet in the Middle has it all. “There are strings and an orchestra, and it just flows into this beautiful middle eight,” notes Hewson.
The plan is to make a small music video and release it as a single. “It will make you cry,” she says.
Hewson is hard at work filming the show’s second season Bad sisters, the Apple TV+ series whose premiere earned four Emmy nominations. It’s a hard, long shoot during a British and Irish winter, but being reunited with her cast members is worth it. “Ever since I started in the industry, I’ve had this feeling of Smurfette Syndrome, where you’re the only girl in a group full of men for some reason,” she says. “Do Bad sisters I think it’s changed the way I work because when you’re in a group of women and everyone gets along, you feel really supported. We actually feel like sisters. The bond is so deep when we work together and you don’t realize how much you miss it.”
One of her cast members, Sharon Horgan, also wrote and developed the show. Working with her and director Dearbhla Walsh inspired Hewson to pursue his own ambitions behind the camera. “Seeing her and working with Susanne Bier, which I just did The perfect couple I learned so much that I would like to direct one day. And I wouldn’t call myself a writer, but I’d sure like to come up with some ideas…”
Nor would she have described herself as a singer. “Yes, that’s right, just last year,” she laughs. Hewson has no big ambitions to build a second career in the music industry. “But under the right circumstances I would do it again. I still take my singing lessons every day as I have found that it has really helped my acting. They opened my voice. I just don’t know if I can write an album or become a pop star.”
It would be fair to argue that there are lesser ways to make a name for yourself in music than applying for a residency at the Las Vegas Sphere. “Yes,” she laughs, “but that’s how it is at home. “Did you write an album? Is it number one on the charts? NO? Then get out of here!’”
Source: Deadline
Ashley Root is an author and celebrity journalist who writes for The Fashion Vibes. With a keen eye for all things celebrity, Ashley is always up-to-date on the latest gossip and trends in the world of entertainment.
