‘It would be weird to have a marriage where things don’t go up and down, but we’re very happy’: Keeley Hawes on 21 years of marital bliss with Matthew Macfadyen and the ‘privilege of approaching 50’

The thing that might surprise you about the Met Gala, says Keeley Hawes, is how promptly it ends. 

‘It’s over very quickly. Ten o’clock! Everyone’s gone!’ 

It’s so all the attendees can get changed into other shiny outfits and go on to other shiny parties.

But, when Hawes and her husband – the actor Matthew Macfadyen – attended the event last year, they didn’t bother with the afterparties. 

‘We were so stunned and tired. We went straight back to our hotel. Had a burger in the room. Talked about everything we’d seen. I was quite into Naked And Afraid at the time so we watched a bit of that to sort-of calm down.’ 

Naked And Afraid, to be clear, is a reality TV show where a pair of unclothed strangers get plonked in the wilderness and have to fend for themselves for 21 days. 

‘It took the edge off,’ says Hawes, ‘having a little glass of wine and watching an episode of Naked And Afraid.’

Hawes, 49, and Macfadyen, 51, are both television bigwigs, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t find the event bizarre.

 When I ask her what the Met Gala bathrooms were like, Hawes says she didn’t go to them once – in six hours.

‘I know! And apparently the loo there is a big deal. You’re supposed to go and take a selfie. But I think, again, I was so stunned by the whole thing that I just didn’t make it to the loo.’

She wore a dress made by Marc Jacobs and sat on a table with Dua Lipa. 

(‘There was a quite big floral arrangement between us so I was sort of…’ She moves her neck, side to side, as if to peek at a pop star.) 

Basically, says Hawes, summarising the evening, ‘Imagine having a dream where you’re at someone’s wedding, but every single person there is the most famous person in the world.’ 

She pauses. ‘Apart from you.’

We’re meeting at the Dome Penthouse of Hotel Café Royal in London. It’s a circular room, with a large jade bathtub in the centre and confusing handle-less doors around its sides. 

She’s shooting this cover story for YOU’s luxury issue and is ostensibly here to talk about fashion and luxey things like sitting opposite Dua Lipa at the Met Gala.

But actually she’s got other stuff to discuss: like the intense stunt training for her most recent series, The Assassin; or how she was asked to play a grandmother when she was only 38; or the fact she’s still in a great marriage after 21 years; or how exciting it is that all three of her grown-up children have found jobs they love; or how she is about to turn 50; and how, basically, she is living a good and happy life.

‘You hear people saying it, don’t you, that when you get to a certain age, you think, ‘Well, I’ve never been happier. I wouldn’t want to be in my 20s again.’ 

Not that there was anything wrong with my 20s, but as you grow older you just relax. And I have relaxed.’

Hawes grew up, the youngest of four siblings, on a council estate in Marylebone, Central London; her father was a black-cab driver, her mother was a full-time mum. 

When she was seven, the Sylvia Young Theatre School opened its new site opposite their home and, two years later, Hawes won a scholarship to attend. 

She was doing adverts by the time she was a teenager and, at 18, got a proper part in Dennis Potter’s last TV show, Karaoke. Since then, really, she has just kept working: Spooks, Line Of Duty, Bodyguard, It’s A Sin, The Durrells, Ashes To Ashes, Scoop, Upstairs Downstairs, The Hollow Crown, Mrs Wilson – Keeley Hawes is, it seems, always on TV.

Still, she says, ‘Like any self-employed person, it never really goes away – the feeling that you might never work again, as weird as that probably sounds. But I think everybody feels it.’

This year Hawes had the lead in two big shows: the BBC’s Miss Austen and Amazon Prime’s The Assassin. In the first, she plays Cassandra, Jane Austen’s restrained but determined sibling, who spends the series trying to burn her now-dead sister’s letters. 

And in the second she’s Julie, a retired hitwoman who, while aboard a superyacht in episode two, stabs a man in the neck with a cheese fork. 

Both got very good reviews; Miss Austen has had a second season confirmed and it’s widely expected The Assassin will get the same.

Next year, Hawes will also be in Falling, a Channel 4 series written by Adolescence screenwriter Jack Thorne. It’s his first love story, although not a straightforward one: Hawes plays a nun who ‘falls’ for a Catholic priest. 

They filmed in Wales and one of the cast members, June Watson, turned 90 on set. When I ask Hawes what she sees herself doing at 90, she very quickly replies: ‘Oh, I don’t want to be working.’ Then she laughs.

‘I mean never say never, but I can’t imagine it. I want to be off, having a nice time. Wearing a massive pair of glasses somewhere in Florida. That’s my retirement plan.’

The Assassin was Hawes’ stuntiest job yet – and while she had a double for some shots, she did several of the scenes herself. 

She ‘didn’t love’ having to load and fire guns (‘It’s frighteningly easy to put a rifle together, once you’ve done it a couple of times’) and preferred the physical combat: ‘It’s like learning a dance.’ Her favourite scene was the aforementioned cheese-fork murder.

The prop weapon was made of foam, ‘So I just –’ Hawes cheerily mimes jamming a fork into the side of someone’s neck – ‘do that.’

Does she reckon she would now fare well in a real-life fight? ‘I’m very jumpy. If one of my children shuts the fridge door a bit too hard, I scream. So I don’t know that I’d be the best.’

She liked the way the character ‘just did not give a s**t’ about murdering people for a living. ‘She’s so cold. It’s the opposite of me. 

She’s extreme.’ Hawes, however, is not the kind of actor who cannot switch a character off. ‘I’ve never really had that in my career. 

I had children quite young – I was 24 when I had my son – so I’ve always had a house full of children to go back to. It means I’ve never had the, I don’t know if you’d call it the ‘luxury’, but I couldn’t ever take my work home and then also be a mother.’

It used to be that when an actress turned about 38 or 39, ‘they [filmmakers] just did not know what to do with [you]’. Today, Hawes says, ‘There still aren’t as many parts for women, and women in Hollywood still aren’t paid as much as men.’ But, generally, she thinks things have improved.

Women do get aged up, though. With The Durrells, Hawes was only 14 years older than her onscreen son, Josh O’Connor. He looked very young for his age though, I say. ‘Yes, I think that’s how that was sold to me too! Rather than, ‘Sorry, you look easily old enough to be his mother.’ (It’s worth mentioning here that Hawes does not look ‘old’ at all. In person she is so pretty that the team on set whispers about it while she’s in the loo.)

She continues – matter-of-fact, almost amused – ‘I mean I’ve played lots of mothers, and grandmothers a couple of times.’ 

The grandmother parts, in the 2014 show The Missing and the 2022 series The Midwich Cuckoos, had, admittedly, ‘quite extreme’ stories; in both, Hawes’ onscreen child had had a child young. But still, she was 38 in the former and 46 in the latter. She considers this for a bit then says, ‘Yes, Matthew’s yet to play a grandfather.’

Hawes’ husband is a year and a bit older than her; last year he won a Bafta and a Golden Globe for playing a young husband in the TV drama Succession. 

‘It is interesting that [being offered grandparent roles] doesn’t seem to be something he has to deal with. I’m quite looking forward to the day that script comes through, and he goes: ‘Hang on a minute!’

Hawes and Macfadyen met filming Spooks in 2002 and married in 2004. She had a child from her first marriage to the cartoonist Spencer McCallum, and by 2006 she and Macfadyen had had two more: a girl and a boy.

All three children sound sorted. Hawes’ eldest son is 25 and a primary school teacher. (Which year? ‘Year two, which is wonderful.’) 

Her daughter is 21 and a hair and make-up artist. (Does she ever do yours for you? ‘Yes!’) And her youngest son is 19 and considering becoming an actor. (Imagine if he played your son? ‘I’d love him to play my son.’) 

‘When you see your children happy – that’s all you want. You can never imagine what they might do and so when they find something, and they love it, and they love going to work… Well, you just go, ‘Phew!’

The couple divide their time between London and the countryside, and the children have ‘sort-of scattered’ and left home. 

Hawes has them all on Find My Friends, and sometimes she likes to watch them moving around their adult lives. ‘I’ve got their permission!’ she adds. And also, they do it back to her.

Recently Hawes and Macfadyen have been watching Celebrity Traitors. She worried about the temperature in the castle: ‘Don’t they all look cold?’ Would she go on the show if she was asked? ‘Well, with all those things, like Strictly, I think it looks great fun, and it’s an amazing thing to learn and such a challenge, but the fear is being voted off in week one. I don’t think I could take it. I’m too thin-skinned.’

She’s a good gardener and recently bought Macfadyen – who is not green-fingered – a big sit-on lawnmower, to coax him outside. The ‘mind trick’ worked; Macfadyen loves the mower.

So far, so blissful. The only snag is cooking, which Hawes really, really hates. ‘My son asked me the other day, ‘When was the last time you cooked something?’ Well, when was it? ‘I don’t know! Thank god Matthew can cook. The kids are quite good, too – I suppose they have to be. It’s not that I don’t like food. I love going to a nice restaurant or I love going to Nando’s. 

But I can’t be bothered.’ What does she do if she’s alone? ‘Oh, god, I have…’ she thinks about this scenario, ‘cheese. Or Deliveroo.’ (Hawes later admits she actually subscribes to Deliveroo premium, a £3.49-a-month service for dedicated users that removes delivery charges.)

A few weeks before our meeting, Hawes posted an Instagram celebrating her anniversary with Macfadyen. The caption read: ’21 years. No notes. Love you with all my heart.’

‘I always get very nervous when I post something [online],’ says Hawes. ‘I have to run it past the kids, going: ‘What about this? Is this OK? Does this look stupid? Am I embarrassing myself? Am I embarrassing you? Everybody? Is everybody happy with this?’ And they go, ‘Yes, it’s fine. Calm down. Just post it.’ As the Gen Zs predicted, it wasn’t embarrassing. ‘People loved it!’ says Hawes, sincerely confused. ‘I think it was my most-liked post ever.’

Twenty-one years is a long time to be married and happy. ‘It is. It doesn’t feel like 21 years, by any means.’ Why does Hawes think that is? ‘I don’t know. We just sort of have a nice time. And also, you become more relaxed [as you get older]. It would be weird to have a marriage where things don’t go up and down occasionally in 21 years, but we’re very happy. I mean, we just get on the lawnmower and…’ She laughs. ‘And it’s as simple as that. You know people often ask, ‘What’s the secret?’ And really, it’s just simple things.’

Also, she says, ‘We like doing things together. That’s probably the key. Because before you know it the kids are off, so you need things to do together – like travelling.’ Next week, Macfadyen and Hawes are going to New York; he’s there to do press for a new Netflix film, she’s ‘just going for a jolly’. On Hawes’ Instagram there are pictures of the duo reading books at Lake Como, snorkelling in Mexico, wearing towelling dressing gowns at a hotel in the Dolomites.

It all looks like it is kind of the dream, I say.

‘To be honest, it kind of is.’

Hawes turns 50 in February and hasn’t, she says, ‘given it much thought’.

‘I’m not daunted by it. That’s not to say I won’t be daunted by it when my birthday arrives.’ She acts out hyperventilating the night before her 50th for a while, then resumes talking. ‘No, it sounds cheesy, but it is a privilege isn’t it, ageing? And you know, I hear 50 is like the new 30? Or, it’s the new something. When I was growing up it was like, ’50. The end is nigh.’

Will she have a birthday party? ‘I don’t really do birthday parties.’ A birthday supper? ‘Maybe.’ A birthday viewing of Naked And Afraid? She looks actually excited by this. ‘Oh! Yes!’

Picture director: Ester Malloy. 

Fashion director: Sophie Dearden-Howell. 

Hair: Paul Donovan using Color Wow. 

Make-up: Justine Jenkins using Inika Organic.