The 2018 movie that convinced Eve Hewson she was more than just another nepo baby: “I’m good at this”
Opinions are very divided over Steven Spielberg‘s latest blockbuster Disclosure Day, starring Emily Blunt, Colin Firth and Eve Hewson, and the question of whether or not it’s any good seems to be dependent on the age of the viewer.
Anyone over 40 who grew up on the likes of Spielberg classics like ET, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park generally loved it, citing it as a proper throwback to his best work, making the links to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and giving it plenty of five-star reviews.
While the younger generations are (quite rightly) pointing out there are a myriad of issues present that require you to not only suspend disbelief entirely, but that feed into the ‘America is the centre of the Universe and totally the greatest’ mentality that just doesn’t seem right in this day and age.
What can’t really be argued with, unlike the fact that if you’re trying to hide from the Secret Service, you can rely on them to literally not use their eyes or ears, is that all the performances from the actors in the movie are pretty good, especially Blunt’s, who could well be getting an envelope from the Academy once March comes around next year.
But Hewson is excellent in it as well as the ‘how did I get caught up in all this’ girlfriend of cyber security expert Josh O’Connor, and it seems that after several years of making indie films, she may well be on the cusp of becoming a major player in the industry. Now I promised myself I would get through this piece without using the ‘Nepo’ word, but I’ve just failed almost immediately, so let’s get it out of the way that she is Bono from U2’s daughter, and yes, that must open an awful lot of doors, and no, she would never have had to worry about money anyway.
Hewson, though, along the lines of someone like Maya Hawke, actually seems to be excellent at what she does, despite the fact that her parents actually tried to dissuade her from any kind of career in the performing arts early on. She went to New York to study film regardless, and after a music video appearance, she landed her first film role in 2011 in a Sean Penn movie called This Must Be the Place, which absolutely tanked, and if you look up what Penn looks like in it, you’ll probably see why.
Regardless, she made another film two years later, called Blood Ties with Clive Owen and Mila Kunis, which lost $20million as well, but another that year with James Gandolfini called Enough Said, released after the Sopranos star died, fared much better. So far, she’d flown under the radar given her provenance, but she then played a main role in Steven Soderbergh’s throwback medical series The Knick and landed her first Spielberg movie with 2015’s Bridge of Spies alongside Tom Hanks.
In the end, Hewson had to take a bit of a backwards step in order to find the first part she really thought she excelled in, a romantic comedy with Andie MacDowell called Paper Year, about a young couple experiencing several life challenges within the first year of marriage. Hewson said of doing comedy for the film: “I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m good at this. I should do more of this.’”
And she was able to display that talent to fantastic effect five years later when she won massive acclaim for the Irish musical comedy Flora and Son, which sparked a bidding war between distributors, with Apple eventually paying $20million for the rights.
