Keeley Hawes and Matthew Macfadyen expose how they introduced MP John Stonehouse’s weird tale to ITV

Matthew Macfadyen and his wife Keeley Hawes are Britain’s most in-demand Television set electrical power few. Pleasure & Prejudice and Ripper Street star Matthew has just lately been catapulted to worldwide fame thanks to the smash US drama Succession, while Keeley, star of Bodyguard, The Durrells and Crossfire, is a single of our most sought-following primary girls.

But the pair have barely worked jointly considering the fact that they famously fell in really like on the set of BBC1 spy drama Spooks 20 several years in the past, so it’s a rare address to see the pair acting together in new drama Stonehouse. Based mostly on the stranger-than-fiction genuine story of Labour MP John Stonehouse, who faked his individual dying in 1974 in a bid to keep away from monetary and own humiliation, the a few-portion series comes to ITV this 7 days.

In a wig, sideburns and phony enamel, Matthew stars as the charismatic MP whose vanity and problems of judgement led him to infamy. Keeley performs Barbara, a model politician’s spouse blindsided by her husband’s faked suicide. ‘Working with Matthew was pleasant!’ claims Keeley, 46. ‘We’d talked about carrying out some thing together once more, and this was fantastic.’

They shared a cosy time in an Airbnb although filming close to Birmingham, even using their pet along. ‘It was possibly stranger for people today all around us on set, figuring out we’re married and how that might get the job done,’ states Keeley. ‘For us, it was just seriously typical. Obtaining labored together right before we understood it would be Ok. We’d travel in collectively, then his fake teeth would go in, we’d do the scenes and then have lunch. It was a beautiful experience.’

Matthew Macfadyen and his wife Keeley Hawes are Britain’s most in-demand from customers Television set energy few, pictured as Barbara Stonehouse and John Stonehouse in ITV’s Stonehouse

Stonehouse’s strange story is informed with a light-weight contact, in the exact same design and style as 2018’s A Pretty English Scandal about MP Jeremy Thorpe, starring Hugh Grant. The similarity is unsurprising, offered that author John Preston is pivotal to the two. A Very English Scandal was dependent on his 2016 non-fiction ebook, tailored for the monitor by Russell T Davies, although Stonehouse is John’s first script for Television set and has the similar jaunty tactic.

John turned to Davies’s Scandal scripts to support him publish Stonehouse. ‘The chance arrived up to do Stonehouse as a Television set collection, not as a e book,’ he says. ‘For me that was a extremely beautiful notion simply because I’d never published a script before. I experienced Russell’s scripts for A Pretty English Scandal at dwelling so I could appear at them and imagine, “Oh, so that’s how he did it.” So it truly did instruct me a lot.’

And the fantastical tale satisfies the breezy tone completely. A growing star in the Labour authorities led by Harold Wilson (Kevin R McNally), junior minister Stonehouse was tipped as a upcoming PM. But outside politics his organizations were being deeply in personal debt, and quite possibly as early as 1959 he’d started spying for Czechoslovakia to make income. Married with 3 youngsters, he also commenced an excess-marital affair with his secretary Sheila Buckley (Showtrial’s Emer Heatley).

His lifetime unravelling, Stonehouse stole the identity of a deceased constituent and in November 1974 faked his loss of life in Miami and travelled to Australia to commence a new everyday living with Buckley. He didn’t get away with it, as the new drama reveals.

It’s this kind of a weird tale, says Matthew, that their very own son could scarcely imagine it. ‘I was telling our 16-12 months-previous and he was like, “What, truly? That’s not correct!”’ laughs Matthew, 48, who has Maggie, 18, and Ralph, 16, with Keeley. She has a different son, Myles, 22, from her to start with marriage.

‘He is ludicrous, but there is anything sympathetic about him,’ provides Matthew. ‘He was extremely personable, by all accounts, funny and charismatic. But he wasn’t with out vanity, and he preferred the trappings of his position. He was fantastic enjoyment to enjoy.’

Matthew Macfadyen as John Stonehouse, Keeley Hawes as Barbara Stonehouse and Emer Heatley as Sheila Buckley

Mired in monetary and intimate issues, with suspicions about his loyalty circulating in Westminster, Stonehouse designed his fateful final decision. ‘I imagine it just turned also a great deal,’ claims Matthew. ‘I played it as if he was on the verge of a anxious breakdown. There is an remarkable scene exactly where he states goodbye to his wife and youngsters and leaves for a company vacation to Miami with them not realizing this was meant to be a last farewell. At the time you get started pondering about it, it’s unimaginable. Very difficult to do. I found it rather moving.’

There are echoes of Matthew’s Emmy-profitable transform as Tom Wambsgans in Succession: Stonehouse and Wambsgans are both of those way out of their depth. ‘There was a little bit of mining of Tom going on when it arrived to taking part in Stonehouse,’ admits Matthew. ‘Both like staying around electrical power – and each are grotesques.’

Another towering efficiency will come from Pirates Of The Caribbean’s Kevin R McNally, who claims he felt pressure to get Harold Wilson just ideal due to the fact viewers will still bear in mind the PM who served from 1964-70 and 1974-76. ‘If you are participating in Disraeli, you go for the historic spirit for the reason that no one alive has met him,’ reasons Kevin, 66. ‘But with Harold Wilson I did not feel I could get away with it being a tiny bit like him. I felt I experienced to do as a great deal as I could to inhabit him totally.

‘At university, I utilized to amuse my classmates by impersonating him. I felt that was handy due to the fact I preferred to be as substantially like him as attainable, as a tribute to my era.’

As for the extended-suffering Barbara, Keeley came to admire her resilience. ‘She was an clever lady who was ambitious for her husband. It was a male-dominated planet. As an MP’s wife, she was applied to a sure amount of push. This was almost nothing compared to the furore following John went lacking and then was located. It was a substantial story. It should have been horrendous, humiliating and deeply upsetting. Their soiled linen aired in the papers. She was really solid and brave.’

For budgetary reasons, the faked dying was shot in Malaga, Spain, all through unusually poor weather conditions. ‘Awful storms,’ Matthew remembers. ‘The sky went yellow with all the sand from the Sahara. We shot there for six days and on all but one of these times no one could get in the h2o because it was much too harmful. Then we had one particular day of weak sun so went for it. The water was really cold. Some of us were in wetsuits and some of us without having – which includes me in wig and sideburns.’

The freezing dip was certainly value it for Matthew to provide to life the flawed politician with the audacious program. He also attempted to convey the comical factor of the person.

‘There’s a lovely ingredient of caper about it,’ he states. ‘It’s the aged adage, “If you can make men and women chortle, you can choose them somewhere else.”’

Stonehouse, Monday, 9pm, ITV1.