A Star Finally Finds Her Voice

Eve Hewson plays a woman who sings to escape in the movie musical Flora and Son'

- EVE HEWSON & ALEX MORRIS

Eve Hewson will not be doing karaoke today. "I have to be really, really hammered to do karaoke," the actress explains, walking through New York's Central Park. "I would really have to be a whole bottle of tequila deep." Not that she is opposed to such things ("I mean, I am Irish"), but it's 10 a.m. on a Wednesday, and up until very, very recently, sober public singing - or sober singing of any kind, really was a complete non-starter. "Absolutely not," she says. "Hard no. It was absolutely my biggest fear."

So she'd played a non-singing nurse in The Knick, a non-singing prostitute in The Luminaries, and a non-singing murderer in Bad Sisters. Then she'd taken a sleeping pill on a flight to London, read the script to Flora and Son about a struggling single mom who finds a guitar and a way to forge a relationship with her teenage son found it to be a "slam dunk," and decided not to "shit my pants," as she usually does at the thought of playing a chanteuse, but instead to call her agent and make a case for why John Carney, the writer-director of Once, should give her the main role: "I said, 'I can give you something that sounds like a real person trying to express themselves, rather than someone who is trained or has a natural gift.' I think it was the sleeping pill. I was kind of like, 'I'm just gonna have to put my big-girl panties on and learn how to fucking sing."