In Summer 2010, Keeley stared alongisde Aidan Gillan as the leading role, Detective Superintendant Martha Lawson, in the 6-part ITV1 crime drama Identity.
Concerning identity theft, the series was created and written by Ed Whitmore, a writer most noted for his work on the BBC's Waking The Dead and the acclaimed ITV mini-series He Kills Coppers. The remake rights have been sold to the ABC Network in America who are developing their own version of the show. ITV confirmed that the show had been cancelled on 19 October 2010, after a single series.
The Identity Unit led by D/Supt Martha Lawson, the founder of the unit, specialises in cases concerning identity fraud by outsmarting, hunting down and unmasking the modern day Jekyll and Hydes.
Martha takes a risk in employing DI John Bloom, an SO-10 officer who has just spent 15 years undercover. He knows first hand what it’s like to pretend to be someone you are not. He’s also only too aware of how easy it is to lose your own identity when you’ve lived a lie for the previous 15 years as a Dublin money launderer and bagman for the Turkish mafia and the past will not go away.
As the series unfolds, DS Wareing becomes more and more concerned about Bloom’s methods and frustrated by what he sees as Martha’s blind and foolish indulgence of him.
Keeley talks about Identity on This Morning:
Keeley Hawes discusses how she herself fell victim to Indentity theft:
Sultry Keeley Hawes will bring some real-life experience to her new ITV drama, Identity, which deals with a police squad investigating identity theft and fraud.
For the Ashes To Ashes star has been hit by the growing crime trend herself — an incident which left her more than £7,000 out of pocket.
"It is about a fictional identity unit which covers anything and everything to do with identity fraud and crime. Sometimes it can be on quite an extreme scale - people having plastic surgery to change their identity if they commit a crime, for instance - so it is definitely not your run-of-the-mill crime drama."
What attracted you to the show?
"It is really brilliantly written. I read the scripts for the first three episodes over one evening and I couldn't stop. I just thought, 'This is amazing'. If somebody had sent it to me and said it was a new American series, I wouldn’t have questioned it. Then they said that Aidan Gillen was on board and I thought, 'Yeah, you try and stop me! I'm in!'"
And who do you play?
"My character, DSI Martha Lawson, heads up the unit. She is very steely and has created a very slick team of people who are brilliant in all their various areas and she is not concerned about getting on with all of them - for her, this is very much business not pleasure. We do see some chinks in her armour towards the end of the series, though."
And how about Aidan Gillen?
"He plays a maverick fellow investigator called John Bloom, who has his own identity issues after working undercover for 15 years. He is brilliant and more or less always delivers the goods, but he gets away with things like vanishing for three days and not telling anybody where he is."
Did you do any research beforehand?
"I went to the police station at Kingston, which is the biggest one in my area, and had a look around. What was alarming was that it looked like the CID office in Ashes to Ashes - it even had the same sort of furniture."
Is Martha a very different policewoman from Alex in Ashes to Ashes?
"She is completely different. Although Ashes was a cop show, it didn't feel like that for me, because the crime of the week wasn't the strongest part of the show. It was about so much more, especially from Alex's perspective. In contrast, Identity is very much a cop show. We only see a bit of their private lives so it is less emotional. But Alex and Martha are both go-getting women and I love the attitude they have."
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