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

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

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.
' 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.
'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.'