Eve Hewson Stars in the Hush-Hush Netflix Series ‘Behind Her Eyes’ — But Details Are Top Secret

Since the top of the pandemic, Irish actress Eve Hewson — an adopted New Yorker — has been unable to return to her U.S. home of 10 years. “I actually can’t get back into the country,” Hewson says, over the phone, from her family’s Dublin home. “I can’t even get a visa, because the immigration office is closed. So I’m 29 and living with my parents again.”

Hewson’s parents are U2 frontman Bono and activist Ali Hewson. They’re also two of the only people she’s at liberty to speak with about one of her two new TV projects that are launching within days of each other this month. The first is Starz’s premiere of the period drama The Luminaries on Feb. 14, in which she plays a young English woman who journeys to New Zealand to start a new life.

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The show she must speak carefully about is Behind Her Eyes, a miniseries that Netflix launches Feb. 17 and which carries as much uneasy mystique as any Hitchcockian thriller. To even talk about Behind Her Eyes is to dance around an elephant that doesn’t reveal itself to be in the room until the sixth and final episode. It’s based on the 2017 book of the same name by Sarah Pinborough, a novel that publisher Flatiron Books promoted by planting the hashtag “#WTFthatending” on social media. “I sort of had like a shotgun wedding with the material,” says Hewson, who had not yet read the novel before rushing in the 2019 audition tape she made while shooting Tesla with Ethan Hawke. “Looking back on it now, I’m like, ‘Oh God, that was so not the right take on the character.’ “

Her ambiguity is intentional. What little can be said about Hewson’s role — in which she gives a wickedly ice-cold performance as a neglected (or is she?) wife of a philandering psychiatrist (Tom Bateman) who begins an affair with his secretary (Simona Brown) — is that some of the series’ most tense moments come courtesy of her aggressive vegetable chopping. It’s a skill, though, that she can’t take credit for. “They brought in a double with my manicure. I wasn’t even asked to chop!” says Hewson, who first gained wide attention for her role in Steven Soderbergh’s 2014-2015 Cinemax series The Knick.

At home, Hewson has been practicing her admittedly novice knife work by cooking for her older sister and two younger brothers, who are also shacked up at their seaside compound. When asked what’s been on the menu during her extended family reunion, Hewson declines to name-check anything as gourmet as the meals she sort of prepared on camera.

“With four siblings here, we’ve managed to have a good time,” she says. “It’s a lot of alcohol, potatoes and cigarettes.”

This story first appeared in the Feb. 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.