Eve Hewson was already nervous. It was her first big scene with Colin Firth in Disclosure Day — a drawn-out mind-control standoff — and she’d been fretting about holding her own with the acting powerhouse. Then she got to set and noticed snipers on the roof of the soundstage.

“I get into the hair and makeup trailer and ask what’s going on, and they’re like, ‘The fucking president is coming,’ ” she says. “So not only is Barack Obama showing up, but the entire rest of the cast who isn’t in the scene is coming to meet him. So I had to do the whole thing in front of [the former president] and Steven Spielberg, plus Emily Blunt and Colman Domingo and Josh O’Connor.”

The actress, 34, has had a lifetime to learn how to be in the presence of formidable figures; her father is Bono. She spent her childhood mostly out of the spotlight in Dublin, where her parents nurtured her creative side by putting her in plays and music lessons (of course), until her former tutor became an independent filmmaker and asked her to help out on set. “That’s when I got the disease of Hollywood — and it is a disease,” she says with a laugh.

Hewson then went to the New York Film Academy and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts to study acting and started auditioning in earnest. “I was in all these audition rooms with all these gorgeous California girls, and I was so Irish,” she says. “At the time, all of the roles for young women were girl-next-door types, and I was sort of mysterious and weird, so it took a beat for me to find my place.”

She found her way to Spielberg once before — a small role in Bridge of Spies, in which her big scene called for her to hide under a coffee table as soldiers shoot up her house. While the cameras were rolling, Spielberg would stand just out of frame with two wooden bats, banging them together to startle her. “It was so practical, and so helpful, and I’d never had a director be that attuned to what I needed,” she says. “I carried that with me afterwards — whenever I had to do anything big on set, I would say to the directors, ‘Can you just bang something together to scare the shit out of me?’ ”

Spielberg kept following her work from there: The Luminaries, Behind Her Eyes, Bad Sisters. In late 2024, when news broke that he was making another UFO movie, she took notice. “And then out of the blue on a random Wednesday, I got a phone call from my agent telling me he wants to Zoom with me in an hour and a half,” she says. “He told me, ‘I’ve been watching you, and I’m so proud of you, and I have a script I want you to read; your character’s Jane.’ “

Someone from his team hand-delivered the script, and Hewson — who assumed it would be a small role and that she would probably die early in the film — was shocked to see Jane on page one and in most of the subsequent pages. “I’ve been telling friends of mine who are actors, even if you think something is a small movie, Steven Spielberg is going to watch it one day and he might cast you, so make sure you show up,” she says.

The pair took one more Zoom meeting, during which Hewson pitched him some ideas for the character (“I can’t even remember what I said, to be honest — I have that Irish gift of the gab”), and she had the offer by the end of the week.

When the two reunited for Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s intuitiveness was even more apparent. Her character is the audience surrogate, the outsider learning about the government’s plot to hide alien life from the public. “She has to be the vulnerable one, and her emotions had to be very immediate, and he would tell me stories that would help me get to where I needed to be, and he would say, ‘I’m right there with you,’ ” she recalls. “If you cry, he’s standing at the monitor crying too. During that scene with Colin, when I’m having to fight him off with my mind and be really tense, Steven told me the next day that it felt like he’d spent 10 hours working out.”

While the Disclosure Day stars embarked on a worldwide press tour, Hewson was elsewhere — in Dublin, filming the motorcycle racing flick Isle of Man opposite Channing Tatum and living with her parents. “I’m 34, and I’ve been spending my Friday nights with my mom and dad watching movies, but we all love it,” she says with a laugh.

But even from afar, she’s been noticing the extra attention that a starring role in a Spielberg summer blockbuster brings. Hewson believes the casting announcement alone helped her score a few more lead roles. “And when the trailer dropped, I started hearing from people I hadn’t spoken to in 10 years,” she says. “I’m nervous that so many people are going to see this movie — every dentist I’ve ever been to, but also the entire world.”

This story appeared in the June 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.