‘Nobody knows what’s real’: Eve Hewson on aliens, Hollywood and her famous dad

As questions go, it’s astonishingly simple. Just six words: are we alone in the universe? That existential query is as old as man’s ability to look up at the stars with wonderment and curiosity. It fuels conspiracy theories. And, in the here and now, it’s a conversational dot point-cum-unexpected media bone being thrown by the US government into the international conversation.

The answer to the question itself, says actress Eve Hewson, who stars in the new alien conspiracy thriller Disclosure Day, sits deep within a suite of questions we persistently ask ourselves about the nature of our existence. “Who are we? What is our purpose? The meaning of life, why we exist and why we are here on Earth?” she says. “And if we’re on Earth and there is life in another universe or another planet, what does that mean?”

The more pressing point is not whether there is an answer but what it means for us, Hewson adds. “What are we supposed to do with that information? Where are we supposed to go? Are we supposed to communicate with this other life? I understand why it’s so fascinating to people because we don’t have the answers. And it’s why people are so drawn to so many theories about it.”

The annals of science-fiction cinema history offer chapter and verse on tales of extraterrestrial life. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) remains an all-time classic, about an alien named Klaatu, whose arrival forces Earth’s governments to accept the reality of intelligent alien life. Contact (1997) and Arrival (2016) deal with different sides of the coin: a verified radio signal from outer space in the former, the arrival of mysterious alien pods in the latter.

But in the body of work of writer, director and producer Steven Spielberg we find the question tackled in a variety of ways. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) he explores the question by setting up a monumental first-contact encounter between scientists and a huge alien mothership. And in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) he approaches it from the friendship between a stranded alien and a human boy.

In Disclosure Day, Spielberg uses the intended disclosure of a translated alien message as the film’s jumping-off point. Kansas City meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) suddenly speaks in an alien language, truth-seeker Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) realises he knows what it means, and Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) – the head of a shadowy black ops organisation named Wardex – sets out to stop him. Hewson plays Kellner’s girlfriend, Jane Blankenship.

In what feels like a scene out of its own spy thriller, Hewson was handed a physical script when she was offered the role. She had to sign for it, read it and then return it when she was done. It might not seem so unusual except that in 2026 almost all scripts in film and television are delivered digitally.

“It’s terrifying, actually,” Hewson says, laughing. “And it’s a huge responsibility. The only other director I’ve heard of doing that is Christopher Nolan. But there’s something so sort of cool and exciting and thrilling about getting handed a script. It does make you feel like you’re really living in Hollywood. I like a script; I like to leaf through them and be able to write my notes in them.”

The 34-year-old actress, perhaps best known in Australia for her work in TV series Bad Sisters, Behind Her Eyes and The Perfect Couple, says she connected with David Koepp’s script immediately. “That’s the beautiful thing about this script, that it really is about real people caught up in this extraordinary experience. What David does so smartly is he really connects the audience, like you are living in it. [The idea that] this could easily happen to you.

“I thought I was going to die on page two,” Hewson adds, laughing. “Sitting down to read that script was just the most extraordinary experience of an actor’s life. And finding out that I wasn’t just a small part. It’s about humanity. It’s about empathy. It’s also a full-on, action-packed chase. So you jump into this story immediately and then get taken on this journey.”

One interesting thing about the film is the way it interacts with real-world headlines. We live in an era when alien encounters have moved out of the cobwebs of the internet and onto the evening news. The US government recently confirmed that military personnel periodically encounter unexplainable Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). However, the US government’s key agencies – the Pentagon, NASA and the intelligence agencies – have never confirmed the existence of evidence of extraterrestrial life, alien bodies or recovered alien spacecraft.

“People are at a loss for truth, and that’s probably why there’s a hunger for a more concrete answer on the subject,” Hewson says. “We’re living in a post-truth society and people want to understand more about the world. We’re also living in a conspiracy-theory society and people are fascinated [by questions like this]. Nobody knows what’s real any more. You can’t even look at your phone without questioning whether the news you’re reading is true. That’s where this fascination is coming from. It’s about truth.”

Born in Dublin, Hewson is the second of four children of activist and businesswoman Alison Hewson and U2 lead singer Paul Hewson, better known by his stage name, Bono. Though it seems clear she was destined always to be an actress – she studied at both the New York Film Academy and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts – her subsidiary studies at the latter included psychology, which she describes as a useful part in the actor’s toolbox. “It just made sense to me that I would do psychology and it helped a lot to understand the human psyche and to understand why people do what they do,” she says.

“The thing that I love about acting is that there’s no end to it. You are consistently learning more and more about human beings every day and you put that into your acting and you can grow and grow as an actor. You’re never done. I’m fascinated by human beings and human behaviour. And with every job I take I learn a little bit more about our species and why we are the way that we are.”

The good news? We’re not as predictable as we might think, Hewson says. “That’s what’s so interesting: everyone is different and we aren’t just textbook. Yes, there are certain things that are predictable but … there’s something new to discover in every character that I play.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given who her dad is, there is another tool in her toolbox: musicality. “Whenever I approach a character I always think about how the character sounds first,” Hewson says. “Dialect is really important to me and really exciting to me. There is a musicality to the way someone speaks that can get in my head. Sometimes I’ll do a scene and I will listen to a song and that will explain the scene to me in a weird way.

“It’s an emotional connection that brings me into that mood. I think a lot of other actors do that … I don’t put together a playlist – like, this is what the character would listen to – it’s more of an energy. A song will give me a certain energy for a scene and it’ll play on a loop in my head during it.”

Growing up with a famous father meant that Hewson understood from childhood that fame was an intangible outside force that, periodically, interacted with her family life. At the same time she comes at her own acting career with a very grounded sense that the woman in the billboard, or on the movie poster, is not the same woman she sees in the mirror.

“I always like to feel like it’s not you, it’s a character,” Hewson says. “But the crazy thing about acting is you do something, you play a character very intensely, as much as you can for a short period of time, and then a year later [while marketing the project] you have to go back and sort of relive who that person was and who you were while you were creating that person.

“So it feels like they’re characters but they’re also time capsules of the person that I was in that moment, you know what I mean? Like a throwback to a specific time in your life. It’s kind of nice. There’s something nostalgic about it. I always look back with a lot of love and pride for the fact that I faced my fears and did it. I’m very proud of myself for going for it.”

Hewson is also far more at ease with the idea of her own fame. “Having a career in Hollywood is like having a really bad boyfriend: you love him so much but he’s totally cheating on you,” she famously said back in 2020. Since then she has moved back to Dublin, creating a clearer boundary between her real life and her day job.

So, how is that relationship in 2026? “It’s definitely very demanding but I’m getting a lot more back,” Hewson says, laughing. “I think we’re in a healthier place. We’ve been to couples therapy, that’s for sure.”

Disclosure Day opens on June 11.

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