Photograph: Luke Varley/BBC/Dancing Ledge Productions
On holiday a few years ago, thriller writer Louise Doughty was idling on a sun lounger, her family spread out through the resort, and her mind wandered to a dark place. “What would I do if we were suddenly in a situation of peril?” says Doughty. “Would I go to that family member? Or that one? Or would I help the people around me? Would I behave heroically? Would I just hide under the lounger?”
That idea has been turned into a three-part drama, Crossfire – Doughty’s first original script for TV – starring Keeley Hawes as Jo, a fortysomething woman on holiday with her three children and charmless husband, and two other couples and their kids (among the great cast are Josette Simon and Anneika Rose). There are tensions all over the place, from Jo’s crumbling marriage to the class divides between staff and guests to the way you know something horrible is coming, in a situation – a luxurious resort in the Canary Islands – where people have let their guard down.
Jo is in her hotel room, texting her lover, when shots are fired around the pool where her children are playing. Suddenly the resort is under siege. Ordinariness, you are reminded, is underrated; a yearning for a time before (you don’t need to have lived through anything as dramatic or traumatic as this to recognise that feeling). Jo, a former police officer, becomes a rifle-toting mama bear in holiday wear, assisted by the hotel manager who likes to shoot rabbits at the weekend, which is to say neither are exactly cut out for stalking the hotel corridors for gunmen and saving the other guests, but it’s what makes it all the more gripping.
“It is so unusual, a part like this,” says Hawes (she and Doughty are speaking on a video call; Doughty in her office heaving with books, Hawes somewhere with an almost comically bare background). In action dramas, “women are generally passive, and Louise was very clear from the beginning that that wasn’t going to be the case”. Later, Hawes adds, in Bodyguard [the 2018 BBC smash in which Hawes played the home secretary Julia Montague] “it’s about a woman being protected by a man. In this case, it’s Jo taking that on.”
Hawes has never been busier, and the idea – thankfully changing – that roles decline as female actors get older hasn’t been true for her. Hawes’s career stepped up a gear in her late 30s and 40s with roles in meaty dramas such as Line of Duty, The Missing and Bodyguard, and the long-running and beloved series The Durrells. In the last year alone she has been in It’s a Sin, the comedy-drama Finding Alice and the sci-fi series The Midwich Cuckoos. Coming next is Stonehouse, in which she plays the wife of the 70s-era Labour politician John Stonehouse, who faked his own death – a great story anyway, but an added dimension comes from Hawes’s husband, Matthew Macfadyen, playing the MP. “We just had far too nice a time,” says Hawes. It’s other people, she says, who think it must have been weird to work together. “There’s this feeling of: ‘They’re married, how’s this going to be?’ Ultimately, he’s an actor that I would have loved to work with anyway. So yes, it was a joy.”
Crossfire is one of the shows Hawes has co-produced through the production company she set up in 2019. “I thought, well, if I want to keep working, I’m going to have to be proactive about it,” she says. “I’m lucky enough to be in a position where I can talk to writers and do what I’m doing, but it’s still about creating work for me and other women my age, and being as diverse as possible. Because we still need change in the industry.” In a more progressive world, the idea of Crossfire – a middle-aged female action hero – shouldn’t, she says, “be a surprise, something out of ordinary and unique”.
Doughty wrote it after the success of Apple Tree Yard, her novel adapted for the hit 2017 BBC drama starring Emily Watson as Yvonne, a woman who starts an affair with a mysterious man she meets at the House of Commons, and whose life is soon derailed. “As you’ll know from my oeuvre, middle-aged women are where it’s at,” says Doughty. There is, she says, “historically a gap in the market in terms of writing about them.” But also, it’s a stage that can bring its own drama, as people reassess their lives and desires. “There was a line in Apple Tree Yard that summed up what happened to Yvonne, which can be applied in a lot of situations: we discovered safety and security are commodities you can sell in return for excitement, but you can never buy them back. Historically, this has been written about a great deal from the point of view of men and my feeling is that women have always done it, it’s just not been written about or acknowledged.”
By the time people, and especially women, are in their 40s or 50s, their careers may be rolling along, but they may also have been raising children or caring for elderly parents. “It seems to me a very understandable and human thing to think: ‘Where’s the excitement in my life? Where’s the stuff that makes me feel just that little bit taller and better and glamorous?’ Everybody wants to believe they are the hero of their own story. I suppose the problem comes when people don’t really understand what they’re risking by doing that. For a novelist or screenwriter, it’s rich territory. I think the question is not: why am I fascinated by it? The question is: why isn’t everybody fascinated by it?”
Doughty’s youngest is 21, and she feels she has come through the “child-rearing years, that quarter of a century. And you start to think: I’ve got access to all that experience but I’ve got a level of personal freedom back. It’s a fantastic time. I love being the age I am.”
There is a freedom to it, Hawes, who is 46, agrees; she has three children, and her youngest is about to turn 16. “You start thinking: ‘Well, where am I now?’ I’ve been busy in my career but I have always tried to stay in the UK, and I’m looking further afield. I’m working away now in a way I couldn’t have done before; I wouldn’t have felt comfortable with it. The world opens up. On top of that, you’ve got these brilliant people, if you’re lucky enough to get on with them, that you’ve created. I just went on holiday with my eldest son. I was flattered that he wanted to go away with me.” She smiles. “It’s delightful to be at that point where they’re becoming adults.”
Does she feel different in her 40s? More confident? “I do,” she says. “One thing, if I could tell my younger self, is everything seems so important but it’s not. Give yourself a break.” She cares less now what people think about her. She used to worry “what [would be] the opinion of me, or what might that soundbite make me look like? But now, I’m like, I don’t care.” She laughs. “I mean, I do, but I care less. It’s a good place to be. You start thinking: ‘Well, what next?’ This is the second act and it should be really exciting.”
For both women, there’s a sense of fresh challenges. When the producer of Apple Tree Yard asked Doughty if she had any ideas that could work for TV, she raised her bleak holiday thought and he urged her to write it. “It’s a bonus at my stage of career to suddenly have this new strand come along,” she says. And Hawes has become an action hero, though a relatable one. She’s competent and relatively fit, but her police training was a long time ago.
It wasn’t an easy shoot, physically or mentally. They filmed for seven weeks in a resort in Tenerife, cast and crew staying together in the hotel itself and largely cut off from the world to keep it Covid-secure (and strangely, adding to the intensity, Hawes’s hotel room was also used as Jo’s room, so her costumes were hanging in the wardrobe). “It was the most gruelling project I’ve ever been part of,” says Hawes. “Just the weight of that horrible gun. It’s like picking up a weight in the morning and running around with it all day long, in the heat.” She is not, she says, someone familiar with the gym. “It was a shock to my system.” And she wasn’t sure she even liked her character, Jo – a woman, we find out, of extremely questionable morals – but that, she says, “is more interesting as an acting exercise. I was uncomfortable about her, I was uncomfortable when I read it. It’s an uncomfortable watch.” Doughty smiles, clearly delighted. “I liked the fact that I was so uncomfortable.”
Crossfire is coming soon to BBC One and iPlayer
