Eve Hewson was already nervous. It was her first big scene with Colin Firth in Disclosure Day — a drawn-out mind-control standoff — and she’d been fretting about holding her own with the acting powerhouse. Then she got to set and noticed snipers on the roof of the soundstage.
“I get into the hair and makeup trailer and ask what’s going on, and they’re like, ‘The fucking president is coming,’ ” she says. “So not only is Barack Obama showing up, but the entire rest of the cast who isn’t in the scene is coming to meet him. So I had to do the whole thing in front of [the former president] and Steven Spielberg, plus Emily Blunt and Colman Domingo and Josh O’Connor.”
The actress, 34, has had a lifetime to learn how to be in the presence of formidable figures; her father is Bono. She spent her childhood mostly out of the spotlight in Dublin, where her parents nurtured her creative side by putting her in plays and music lessons (of course), until her former tutor became an independent filmmaker and asked her to help out on set. “That’s when I got the disease of Hollywood — and it is a disease,” she says with a laugh.
Hewson then went to the New York Film Academy and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts to study acting and started auditioning in earnest. “I was in all these audition rooms with all these gorgeous California girls, and I was so Irish,” she says. “At the time, all of the roles for young women were girl-next-door types, and I was sort of mysterious and weird, so it took a beat for me to find my place.”
