‘Flora And Son’ Star Eve Hewson Reveals The Fear She Had To Overcome To Make John Carney’s Irish Musical Drama: “I Was Scared Of Singing”
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The ominous task that faced Eve Hewson when she first read John Carney’s script for Flora and Son had been accepted before she even realized it.
Sure, she knew Carney’s work, almost exclusively delivering features that baked music into the very fabric of their construction. She’d seen Glen Hansard belting at the top of his lungs in Carney’s debut, Once; Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo making sweet music together in Begin Again; Ferdia Walsh-Peelo embracing ’80s pop in Sing Street. She knew what was coming, but still hoped it never would.
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She fell madly in love with Flora, a single mum living in a Dublin apartment block with her delinquent teenage son Max, turning each page as Flora salvaged a guitar from a skip, had it tidied up, and gifted it to Max. She followed along as the character started taking guitar lessons by Zoom with a dreamy American man named Jeff that Flora couldn’t resist flirting with. She had determined, having traveled this far into the screenplay, that she was going to try for this part. So, with naïve optimism, Hewson hoped that Flora might turn out to be the silent guitarist in this man’s rock band. But then…
“Then she started singing,” groans Hewson, rolling her eyes. “Oh no!”
Memphis Eve Sunny Day Iris Hewson likes to say she’s the daughter of hippies. It explains the name, she smiles. Her debut role in The 27 Club in 2008, while she was still a teenager, brought her to the Tribeca Film Festival and landed her an agent. It 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 had grown up in a musical household—her father plays professionally in a small Irish band called U2—and she loved music. By the time she was born, her dad’s band had been doing a relatively decent job of becoming the biggest thing in music, and she was able to benefit from an affluent upbringing with her three siblings. She took piano lessons, learned to play the drums and the guitar, and always assumed music would be her path.
If music was the obvious vocation, drama was the hobby… until it wasn’t. Her drama tutor Erica Dunton was also a filmmaker who’d made a couple of no-budget features when she cast a 15-year-old Hewson in The 27 Club. She spent two weeks in North Carolina shooting the movie, and something just clicked. “I fell instantly in love with acting,” she says. “I knew I wanted to study acting, to go to college for it.”
The guitar lessons fell by the wayside—she had never been a fan of the instrument—and music in general took a back seat. But her parents told her she could only apply to one drama school: her other choices had to be purely academic. “They were like, ‘Good luck,’ basically.”
In a bold move, Hewson decided that the drama school she’d plump for would be the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts at NYU; not exactly a safety school. “I had to do two monologues for my audition, and I remember doing them in my dreams for literally months beforehand,” she says. “I thought, ‘If I fuck this up, I’m screwed. I’m never going to be able to move to New York and go to college.’ I swallowed my nerves, rushed the audition, and went home and puked all night long. The nerves came flooding back. I kind of learned that I’m good under pressure; the anxiety comes after the fact.”
This quality of Hewson’s is what helped her over the hump when it came to Flora’s frustrating insistence on singing in Carney’s script. “I felt like if I said no to the meeting because I was scared of singing, what kind of an idiot would I have been?” she says.
She met with Carney over Zoom, made her case to play the part, liked him enough that she became even more determined to get it, and didn’t dare to tell him she didn’t think she could sing. He gave her the part the next day. “I said to myself, ‘You know what? Forget it. I’ll figure out how to sing. It’ll be fine.’”
Ahead of the shoot, she rented an Airbnb in Los Angeles, bought a guitar, and started vocal coaching. For two months she worked to get in shape, and it built her confidence. “But it was funny, John and I didn’t even really talk about the part for that whole time. Finally, it was like, ‘Shall we rehearse?’ And we decided, ‘Nah, let’s have a few dinners and then start shooting.’”
Momentum, then, became her guiding light. “During the shoot, it was five weeks of keeping going. ‘Don’t think about what you did today, think about what you’re doing tomorrow. Get it done, don’t second-guess yourself.’ And then after, I’m like, ‘Oh my god, what did I do? What’s going to happen?’ It was about six months before I saw the film where I thought it was going to end my career and might be the worst thing I’d ever done.”
Hewson capitalizes on the way John Carney describes his approach to filmmaking to explain her own lack of faith in her musical talents. He describes his movies as rickety, like a stool with only three legs. Full of character and lovable, but far from perfect. “Flora and Son definitely feels imperfect, and I love that about it,” Hewson says. “It feels scrappy, like it’s an emotional outburst. It feels like the story has come out of him involuntarily. So, Flora doesn’t need to be a perfect singer.”
As anyone who’s seen the movie and heard its soundtrack can attest, both Hewson and Carney are being modest. Pushed to believe in herself a little, she reluctantly admits, “I actually really like my voice, now. It was such a psychological thing in my head that this was the one thing I would never do that I’d just completely written off the possibility. So, it’s wild—and important for me, actually—that this happened to me, and that I overcame it.”
Since the film’s debut at January’s Sundance Film Festival, Hewson has been hearing about how well Flora and Son has been connecting. “Women come up to me after screenings in tears, saying, ‘I’m a single mom and this really moved me.’ I have friends who’ve always been honest with me about the stuff I’ve done that they haven’t liked, and they’ve all been taken in by it. One friend sent me a video of her and her husband dancing to ‘High Life’ and ‘Dublin 07’. It has been so much fun.”
Carney heavily invested his cast in shaping the journey of the film, so Hewson feels a greater attachment to it. “He’s quite childlike as a director,” she says. “If he gets an idea, it’s like, ‘Ooh, let’s try this.’ He creates an atmosphere where everyone’s having fun, and everyone’s involved. The whole thing is so playful.”
Halfway through Flora and Son, she sings a song with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Jeff, called “Meet in the Middle”. As the date approached to shoot the scene, she was cognizant that she hadn’t received a song to learn. She quizzed Carney, who told her that she’d be joining him in 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 that song,” she says. It was also the first day she’d met Gordon-Levitt. “It was like we all got together, and magic happened. We all met in the middle.”
It comes from Carney’s openness to collaborate, she insists. “You get the best ideas out of everybody. Yeah, you’ll throw in a few shit ideas, but those won’t get used, and we’ll only use the best of everybody. His approach creates the space for that to happen.”
It’s noted in the movie that the song is missing a bridge, and as the plot marches on, it never does get one. This nagged at Clark, who has, in recent weeks, gathered the gang back together to finish it. Everything in Flora and Son is designed to be homebrewed, but this special version of “Meet in the Middle” has it all. “There’s strings and an orchestra, and it just goes off into this beautiful middle eight,” Hewson notes.
The plan is to shoot a little music video and put it out as a single release. “It’ll make you cry,” she says.
Hewson is hard at work shooting the second season of Bad Sisters, the Apple TV+ series whose first go-around picked up four Emmy nominations. It’s an arduous, long shoot during a British and Irish winter, but reuniting with her castmates makes it worthwhile. “Since I started in the business, I definitely remember having that feeling of ‘Smurfette syndrome’, where for some reason you’re the only girl in a cast full of men,” she says. “Doing Bad Sisters has changed my approach to work, I think, because when you’re in a group of women and everybody gets along, you feel genuinely supported. We actually feel like sisters. The bond is so deep when we work together, and you don’t realize how much you miss that.”
One of her castmates, Sharon Horgan, also co-wrote and developed the show. Working with her, and with director Dearbhla Walsh, has inspired Hewson’s own ambitions behind the camera. “Seeing them and working with Susanne Bier who I just did The Perfect Couple with, I’ve been learning so much that I would want to give directing a go at some point. And I wouldn’t call myself a writer, but I could definitely be into coming up with some ideas…”
She wouldn’t have called herself a singer, either. “Yeah, not until last year, that’s true,” she laughs. Hewson has no grand ambitions to forge a second career in music. “But under the right circumstances I’d do it again. I still do my vocal lessons every day because I’ve found that they’ve really helped my acting; they’ve opened up my voice. I just don’t know if I could write an album or become a pop star.”
One might quietly suggest that there are smaller ways to make a mark in music than shooting for a residency at the Las Vegas Sphere. “Yeah,” she laughs, “But that’s just what it’s like in my house. ‘Have you written an album? Is it number one in the charts? No? Then get out of here!’”
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