Eve Hewson was already nervous. This was her first big scene with Colin Firth Disclosure day – a long-standing confrontation with mind control – and she was wary of associating herself with the acting force. Then she got ready and noticed snipers on the roof of the soundstage.
“I walk into the hair and makeup segment and ask what’s going on, and they’re like, ‘The f***ing president is coming,’” she says. “So, not only does Barack Obama show up, but the rest of the actors who aren’t in the scene are coming to meet him. So I had to do everything in front [the former president] and Steven Spielberg, in addition to Emily Blunt, Colman Domingo, and Josh O’Connor.
The 34-year-old actress has spent her life learning how to be in the presence of formidable personalities. Her father is Bono. She spent her childhood away from the spotlight in Dublin, where her parents nurtured her creative side by getting her involved in plays and music lessons (of course), until her former teacher became a freelance filmmaker and asked her to help out on set. “That’s when I got the Hollywood disease — a disease,” she says with a laugh.
Hewson then went to the New York Film Academy and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts to study acting and began auditioning in earnest. “I was in all these audition rooms with all these amazing girls in California, and I was very Irish,” she says. “At that time, all the roles young women were playing were girl-next-door type, and I was kind of mysterious and strange, so it took me a long time to find my place.”
She had found her way to Spielberg once before, in which she played a small role Bridge of Spieswhere her big scene calls for her to hide under a coffee table while soldiers shoot at her house. While the cameras were rolling, Spielberg was standing out of frame with two wooden bats, hitting them together to scare her away. “It was very practical, very helpful, and I’ve never had a director who was so in tune with what I needed,” she says. “I carried that with me after that – whenever I had to do anything big on set, I’d say to the directors: ‘Can you hit something together to scare me?’ ”
Spielberg continued to pursue her work from there: The two lights, Behind her eyes, Bad sisters. In late 2024, when news broke that he was making another UFO movie, I took notice. “All of a sudden, one Wednesday, I got a phone call from my agent telling me he wanted to connect with me via Zoom in an hour and a half,” she says. “I’ve been watching you,” he said, “and I’m very proud of you, and I have a text I want you to read; “Your character is Jane.”
A member of his team hand-delivered the script, and Hewson—who had assumed it would be a small role and that she would likely die early in the film—was shocked to see Jane on the first page and on most of the subsequent pages. “I tell my actor friends, even if you think something is a small movie, Steven Spielberg will see it one day and might cast you, so make sure you come,” she says.
The duo had another Zoom meeting, where Hewson pitched some ideas for the character (“I can’t even remember what I said, to be honest – I have that Irish gift for gab”), and they got the offer by the end of the week.
When the two met for Disclosure daySpielberg’s intuition was even clearer. Her character is the audience surrogate, an outsider who learns about the government’s conspiracy to hide alien life from the public. “She had to be the vulnerable one, and her emotions had to be so immediate, and he would tell me stories that would help me get to where I needed to be, and he would say, ‘I’m there with you,’” she recalls. “If I cried, he would stand in front of the screen and he would cry too. “During that scene with Colin, when I was having to fight him with my mind and being so nervous, Stephen told me the next day that he felt like he spent 10 hours rehearsing.”
while Disclosure day The stars embarked on a global press tour, and Hewson was elsewhere – in Dublin, filming a motorcycle racing film Isle of Man Opposite Channing Tatum and lives with her parents. “I’m 34, and I spend Friday nights with my mom and dad watching movies, but we all love them,” she says with a laugh.
But even from afar, I noticed the extra attention that a starring role in one of Spielberg’s summer blockbusters brings. Hewson believes the casting announcement alone helped her land a few lead roles. “And when the trailer came out, I started hearing from people I hadn’t talked to in 10 years,” she says. “I’m nervous because a lot of people are going to see this movie – every dentist I’ve ever been to, but also the whole world.”
This story appeared in the June 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter. Click here to subscribe.
