It must have been a case of good news/bad news? “Yeah, really shit news. Yes, it seems a very long time ago now — and it is, I suppose. I’m glad it’s behind us. Usually people get together and I think it’s a romantic time and lovely to look back on, but actually it wasn’t. It was just a matter of getting through it.” Happiness came later? “Yes. Yes.”
At least she must have known that, to go through all that, Matthew really wanted her? “Yeah, and we’ve outlasted the series, which is more than some people can say.” Had she suffered badly from guilt? “I did do. I really did. I’d be some sort of psychopath if I didn’t. I really did, but I’m better now. It’s the worst, worst feeling, guilt. It’s terrible. You know, I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. I know it was my own doing but it was not resting easy with me.” Did she get any professional help? “No.” Just got on with it? “Yeah.”
Happily, relations with McCallum, settled in a new relationship, have repaired to the extent that he is, even as we talk, childminding for her. She praises him for Myles, their son, turning out apparently unaffected by the confusion. “It’s down to the way that Spencer is as a human being. He’s been amazing and it shows in Myles. It really does. He’s confident, he’s happy and he has the best of all worlds. He has all the time he needs (with his father) and he has the family unit with us.” He calls Spencer “Dad” and Matthew “Matthew”? “Yes, well, he calls Matthew ‘Mah’ because he couldn’t say ‘Matthew’ when he met him. We all get on so well, my ex-husband and my husband and me. We all have a drink together and sort of socialise. It’s quite extraordinary and that’s down to him. More than anything, that’s down to him.”
It is, I say, a modern situation. She points out it is not so very modern. By the time her schooling was over at 16 she was the only child left in her class whose parents were still together. “I think that it’s pointless staying in a loveless marriage. I wasn’t in a loveless marriage but if you’re not happy, then that reflects — doesn’t it? — on your children. Happy grown-ups make for happy children. My lot seem to be coping very well and Myles has got his sister and his brother.” He likes them? “He does like them. He says I can have Maggie and he will have Ralph.”
Spooks was, then, a life-changing job for her. Personally, I have always found its solemnity borderline hilarious but millions have bought into it — a tribute, no doubt, to the actors (it can’t be the scripts). The anaesthetist who helped to deliver Ralph recognised both mother and father from it and spent six hours interrogating them about its secrets. Not long ago, in the electricals department at John Lewis, a man came up and whispered that he had applied to “work” with her. “Please don’t let him get into MI5,” she pleads.
She and Macfadyen left during the third series. “I wanted to go by then. Not because I didn’t think it was a good show. I think it’s brilliant. As everybody knows, it’s fantastic, but the six months in a windowless room, six days a week, had started to take its toll.” Since then her best work has been as Mrs Macbeth, the celebrity chef’s wife in last year’s sexy BBC update of the Scottish play — and as Steve Coogan’s wife in the movie A Cock and Bull Story, filmed while she was pregnant with Maggie. She admits it was sometimes tough being the straight woman to so many comic geniuses, not only Coogan, but Stephen Fry and Rob Brydon. “They’re not relentlessly funny,” she promises me, “but they’re quite childish in their quest to be funnier than the next one.”
A Christmas ago she was excellent as the much-fancied Fancy Day in ITV’s Hardy adaptation, Under The Greenwood Tree. This Christmas she will be even more visible, not only in After Thomas but in The Vicar of Dibley Christmas specials in which the vicar gets married. In a bit of complicated plotting, she plays her both her fiancé’s sister and his wife. Hawes is not one to gush about fellow performers, but about Dawn French’s loveliness she does.
Nothing should stop her now — unless, I speculate, it is her domestic circumstances. With her first husband needing to be close to Myles, would that prevent this golden couple decamping to Hollywood? “I’m not sure that we would want to. I mean, you don’t have to these days. That’s quite an old-fashioned thing, thinking you have to pack everything up and go. Yes, to a certain extent, out of sight, out of mind and you have to be there and keep reminding people of your existence. But then Matthew does a film like Pride and Prejudice and is up for Golden Globes.” All filmed in Northamptonshire or somewhere? “Well, exactly. It doesn’t seem to have affected his career not being there. If we had to go, we’d go for a couple of months maybe to shoot something. Spencer is self-employed. We’d work something out. It would be fine.”
The fact that she has already, at 30, had a fine career, a remarkable one for someone who had given up on acting after stage school and was content to muddle around as a model (Clearasil and Biactol ads, that sort of thing) and doing work experience on glossy magazines. It is only thanks to her old agent putting her up for a role in Dennis Potter’s ultimate work Karaoke that she is an actress at all. I ask if her parents were pleased or worried that she was getting her break in such a high-profile but sexually dubious drama. She says that they, like her, were just surprised that she was no longer in a fashion cupboard counting shoes. ()
The only big thing that she has missed out on was a role in Gosford Park, despite Robert Altman looking her up and down during an audition and declaring that she looked like “a prize racehorse”. “I’d like to work with him before it is too late. He is kicking on a bit.” She pauses detecting, at last, the tense in which I have phrased my last few questions. “He hasn’t died, has he?”
I give her my paper to read. With motherhood, something has to give, and for her it has clearly been finding time to follow the news. Still, it is nice to be able to surprise Keeley Hawes for a change.
After Thomas is on ITV1 at 9pm on Boxing Day.
