This Aussie actor was ‘raised on Chicago’. Now she’s starring alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones

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Growing up in Mount Eliza on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, Hattie Hook began her performing career via dance and musical theatre. Though she got into film in her teenage years, she never thought she would be starring alongside a Tony award-winner like Catherine Zeta-Jones.

“I’ve never said this to her, so I hope she doesn’t read this, but I was raised on Chicago,” Hook says, ahead of the release of the pair’s new show Kill Jackie. “Oh my God. I’ve loved her work forever. I mean, are you kidding me? It’s Catherine Zeta-Jones – like, dude.”

In all their scenes together, Hook says her main priority was trying to be “cool as a cucumber”.

“She really was so warm and encouraging, and I felt really supported on set with her. As the lead actor, you’re such a tone-setter and I really admired the way she carried herself on set. I learned so much from her. Her camera technique is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Her command of camera, her awareness of camera, the way she uses her eyes...

“And she’s hilarious. She has that incredible Welsh sense of humour which I’m so happy she gets to use in the show.”

An eight-part crime action thriller, Kill Jackie is fuelled by offbeat characters, rat-a-tat repartee and a high-stakes cat-and-mouse dynamic. It’s also part of a wave of recent action series – from Killing Eve to Ride or Die to The Assassin – that are led by women.

Based on the 2018 novel The Price You Pay by best-selling author Nick Harkaway, writing as Aidan Truhen, Kill Jackie is a skirmish of rage, revenge, dark humour and unexpected twists with the action led by Zeta-Jones as former international drug smuggler Jackie Price. (Notably, in the book the main character is a man named Jack Price).

Price stopped selling cocaine years ago, transferring her dealing skills to a successful career trading high-end fine art to the ultra-wealthy. But her past is catching up with her. Cue unexpected explosions, uninvited gun-wielding hitmen in her luxury flat and the discovery she is the target for a hit led by a mysterious international terrorist organisation known as the Seven Demons.

Hook, known best for the Stan*-BBC TV series Ten Pound Poms, ABC crime drama Savage River and feature film Of An Age, stars as Charlie, Jackie’s assistant. Loyal and trusting of each other, the pair face increasingly perilous stakes as Jackie’s luxurious, settled and anonymous life of two decades is threatened at every turn.

“Charlie is that classic Gen Z tech-savvy assistant,” Hook says. “She’s no-nonsense and straight to the point,” she says. “[Charlie is also a] kid who has no one and has come from nothing. And Jackie has given her a life. Charlie is very attached to her and so everything with Charlie is about Jackie: making sure she’s okay, and she’s happy and that nothing is going to threaten her.

“It’s a really interesting relationship in that way. It’s nothing I’ve really played before: this older sister-younger sister, friends-but-not friends dynamic.”

Directed by Damon Thomas (Killing Eve, Crooked House) and co-created by Conor Keane, Tom Butterworth (Gangs of London) and Peter Lawson (John Wick), Kill Jackie is also rife with eclectic acting talent. From Sidse Babett Knudsen (Borgen) to Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Julian Barratt (The Mighty Boosh, Flowers), Julian Rhind-Tutt (Britannia, Green Wing) and Daniel Ings (The Gentlemen, The Crown), the series’ range of characters is vast and varied.

“Every character is so original,” Hook says. “It’s such a mixed bag of puzzle pieces and characters that I’ve never seen before ... Seeing them all interact is so delicious.”

She says Ings, who plays Jackie’s lawyer and crush, was particularly memorable.

“He’s the most exciting scene partner I’ve ever had because, in this piece, he’s very freewheeling,” she says. “He’s an absolute stick of dynamite, and he would be completely different take-to-take, always improvising. I’ve never felt so unprofessional on a set. I was just constantly cracking up. He is so, so good.”

Though Hook has been acting since her teenage years, she says she still has “such a complex” that she didn’t do any formal training. “I feel like all my mistakes have been immortalised on camera which is kind of mortifying. I definitely am someone who’s learning as I go.”

She says being part of Ten Pound Poms, in which she played Pattie, a 16-year-old who migrates to Australia and faces life as a single mother in the 1950s, was a particularly important step in her acting education.

“That was my university, my study,” she says. “You delve into so many high-stakes emotions [in that show] so it was a great training ground. And particularly working with Faye Marsay [Game of Thrones, Lady Chatterley’s Lover]. Shout out! I learnt so much from her.”

Hook, who moved to London permanently this year, has several other projects on the way too.

“I’m starting on something in November which I’m in prep for right now,” she says. “It’s another screen thing and I think literally the only thing I can say is that I’m really genuinely excited about it.

“There’s so much opportunity in the arts, and there’s just so much going on over here. But also, I just love London as a city.”

She’s still always thinking of audiences back home, though. “I really hope the Aussies like [Kill Jackie],” she says, ahead of the show’s release. “I think the Aussies will really appreciate the sense of humour.

“It feels so original to me and I just really hope people enjoy it.”

Kill Jackie is streaming on Stan now.

*Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.