Eve Hewson on this year’s funniest dark comedy, Bad Sisters: ‘We were peeing our pants laughing’

The show was a real gift for Eve, even if she didn’t see it as such at first. “First of all, I got the script the day before Christmas eve,” she says. “And I was like, ‘I don’t want to have to audition. I don’t want to make a f**king tape, it’s Christmas time!’ My agent told me to read it, and I was hoping it was sh*t, so I didn’t have to cancel my Christmas plans. I read it, and I was like, ‘oh f**k, this is so good!’ Now I am ganna have to cancel my plans, put down the Guinness down and make the tape.’”

What spoke to her about playing the ‘messy sister,’ Becka, who is a free spirit with a penchant for a good pint and hot men? “I’d never had that experience before where I was like, ‘this is me basically in a character.’ I’m definitely far more professional than Becka, and I do have my life together more, but there’s a messiness to her and a wildness to her that I definitely relate to,” Eve replies.

Landing the role just as she turned 30 also marked a coming of age moment for Eve, that moment where your messiness hopefully subsides and out of the debris of your twenties, an adult emerges. Something I relate to. “I feel like she’s my ode to my twenties,” Eve confirms, “when you don’t have everything together, you don’t know where your life is going, you’re somewhere in between childhood and adulthood, but you’re not really an adult either. You aren’t forced to have a proper career. You can float around, and you don’t need to buy a house. It’s the decade where you’re discovering things about yourself and all of your insecurities that you have about yourself and feeling like you don’t have direction. You look like a grown-up, but you’re not. Everyone is just pretending and winging it. It’s also a period where you make all the wrong decisions, you date all the wrong people, you drink too much. It was a perfect moment for me to put all of my experience into one person and then step away from it, say goodbye to it in a way.”

I was a certified messy bitch in my twenties, how messy was Eve, I ask? “Oh, a messy bitch 100%,” she erupts with laughter. “It was just the messiest decades, and you couldn’t f**king pay me to go back! My thirties are a good place to be. It’s my safe place. It was amazingly cathartic looking back and then sort of moving through it. As long as they don’t bring me back through it in season two. I think I’ve said goodbye. Maybe if we do season two, she can have her sh*t together for my mental health.”