Eve Hewson

Put Eve Hewson in a kitchen with three other women talking over her and she looks at home. In Bad Sisters (2022) her Becka Garvey is a mess, and Sharon Horgan's scripts let the mess be charming rather than tiresome. The sisters swim off the rocks outside Dublin in the cold, argue, and want their brother-in-law dead, and Hewson's job is to be the one the others have long since stopped being surprised by. She does it without asking for sympathy, which is why she gets it.

The road there was long and mostly spent in other people's films. Small parts and shorts from 2008; a first proper role as Mary opposite Sean Penn in Paolo Sorrentino's This Must Be the Place (2011); then the nurse Lucy Elkins in Steven Soderbergh's The Knick (2014–2015), which is where people began to notice. After that came supporting parts in Spielberg's Bridge of Spies (2015), Papillon (2017) and Robin Hood (2018), reliable and not much remarked on. The leads arrived later, and on television: Behind Her Eyes (2021), Bad Sisters, The Perfect Couple (2024), with the title role in John Carney's Flora and Son (2023) in between. The nearest thing to a criticism anyone has made of her is that the good parts took a long time to come.

It is a pattern we have watched continue. In Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly (2025) she is Daphne, part of a side plot on a long train journey that comes and goes without leaving much behind; by the second stop we were looking at the scenery, and that was not her doing. In Disclosure Day (2026), her second film for Spielberg, she and Wyatt Russell work around the edges of a hunt that belongs to Emily Blunt. Neither is a failure of hers. Both are films that hired her and found little for her to do. Directors of real standing keep casting Hewson, and they keep placing her at the edge of the frame.

So go back to the sisters to see what she does with room. We laughed more at the Garveys in a kitchen than at most comedies that were only trying to be comedies, and a fair share of that is Hewson, who plays Becka's disasters from the inside, at full speed, and never winks at us over the character's head. She has said Becka "is so close to my heart. I was a girl like her," and it shows; there is no distance between the actor and the trouble. It is the one performance of hers we have reviewed that we could describe to a friend in a sentence, and that is the test.

Start with Bad Sisters, where she has company and time. Then hope somebody gives her a film with a kitchen in it.