She’s one of the most gifted actors of her generation but Sally Hawkins is a reluctant star. In a rare interview, she talks about self-criticism, losing herself in her imagination and making people laugh
Well, he has to say that.” The actor Sally Hawkins is talking to her publicist. We are on Zoom, the three of us, discussing Hawkins’s latest film, The Lost King, in which she plays Philippa Langley, the real-life amateur historian who, in 2012, discovered the remains of Richard III in a Leicester car park. I’ve mentioned I enjoyed the film, which happens to be the truth, but Hawkins won’t have it. When I protest, she becomes meaningfully bashful, lifts her fringe above her head, briefly tousles it into a clump, and allows it to spill back messily, hiding her eyes.
At 46, Hawkins has worked on film and television sets for more than two decades. She has been nominated for two Academy Awards, won a Golden Globe and appeared in productions that become newsworthy most frequently for her performances. James Corden, a close friend and longtime colleague of Hawkins, told me of her work, “You’ll never find anyone who says, ‘I just don’t get it.’” Guillermo del Toro, who directed Hawkins in The Shape of Water, said, “She’s one of the people I most revere in the world,” and describes her as “an extraordinarily good human being – the word empathy doesn’t begin to describe it.”
