21 January 2026

What it’s like to be played by Claire Foy

I said “Hello, film Dad” to Brendan Gleeson in a wobbly voice, and gave him a huge hug

Despite my background as a Cambridge academic, I can be mind-meltingly stupid. Just before filming began for H Is for Hawk, the movie adaptation of my memoir about training a goshawk after my father’s death, the director, Philippa Lowthorpe, asked me if I would have a Zoom meeting with Claire Foy, who’d be playing me. “Of course!” I said. During the call, as Foy asked me a series of acute and perceptive questions, I kept thinking, “Wow, weird. I didn’t expect for Claire to be so much like me.”

It wasn’t until a friend barked with laughter when I recounted this that I realised our call was partly for Foy to hone her version of me. But how completely she inhabited the role only became clear on the freezing October afternoon when I made a set visit to my old Cambridge college. Banks of lights, snaking cables, actors dressed as porters, fellows and students had already turned the scene strange and dreamlike. But then I saw Foy – me right down to a splash of artfully painted hawk poo on her brown corduroy trousers – walking through the cloisters with a goshawk on her gloved fist, exactly reproducing my slightly lurching gait, the space between her and the hawk charged with familiar care and fascination “My God”, I thought, “I’m a ghost, watching myself 17 years ago.” It was such a haunting that I clutched at the brickwork next to me to feel its roughness for reassurance I was actually there.

The film was optioned very soon after the book was published, back in 2014. I was asked early on if I’d like to have a go at writing the screenplay. “Thank you, but no,” I said, firmly. It wasn’t that I couldn’t; it was that I didn’t think I should. Stories aren’t the possession of those who tell them, no matter how personal they might be. Readers have told me that H Is for Hawk wasn’t simply about losing a parent and running to the wild to escape grief. It was about everything from being a first-time parent to a meditation on international relations. I knew it needed to be brought to life by other people. So I was delighted when the novelist and screenwriter Emma Donoghue came on board and made some bold decisions, including jettisoning the character of TH White, who attempted to train a goshawk in the 1930s and whose story runs parallel to mine in the book. The film couldn’t have involved him without losing the flowing, fierce, gentle intimacy that illumines every scene.

Right from the start I wanted to make sure the falconry was done right. I’d seen too many films in which hawks were miserable and abused – I still wince at that scene in The Vikings, in which a flapping goshawk is held by the feet and twitters in terror trying to get away from Tony Curtis’s face. Even aviary-bred and raised goshawks are so highly strung and nervous that I worried the book might be unfilmable. Once Lloyd and Rose Buck – renowned falconers and animal filming experts – were on board, I relaxed. They tutored Foy (who turned out to be as extraordinarily gifted as a falconer as she is an actor) and our avian cast was assembled by the wonderful Dede Gardner from the production company, Plan B, who personally bought aviary-bred goshawk chicks for the film (to this day they continue to be much-loved free-flight falconry birds). Much later, when I saw test footage of Dede’s goshawks flying alongside drones, I bawled my eyes out. I’d never seen footage of hawks that so perfectly captured how it felt when I was out with my hawk Mabel, like the bird was carrying a part of your heart as it flew.

I was thrilled when Lowthorpe was attached to direct. I knew her from her deeply moving Three Girls. She worked on the screenplay and met with all the real-life people in the book, including my falconry guru Stuart, who was by then very ill with the cancer that would take him before he ever got to see it – a great sadness, for I know he’d have loved it. She couldn’t meet my dad for obvious reasons but saw Brendan Gleeson as the perfect man to play him. He was and is. I met him on a set visit: he was clambering out of a van, forehead furrowed as he observed that it must be a bit strange for me to see him dressed in my father’s clothes. There was such gentle concern in his voice, and my heart crumpled, hearing it. I realised then his emotional investment in playing a Good Dad, heard myself saying “Hello, film Dad” in a wobbly voice, and without even stopping for a moment to think about it, gave him a huge hug.

Reality, story and movie have become commingled since I first saw the film in a screening room in Bristol. Back then it moved me to tears. It was beautiful, and true. But also very confusing. Sometimes when Foy came on screen, I thought it was me, and I could feel my brain doing its best to integrate what it saw on screen into real-life memories. Now, when I think of loved ones from the book, I think of the actors, too. I think of the careful work of writers, costume designers, production designers, the beautiful cinematography.

The film is a bricolage. It’s built of the book and the minds and skills of many artists – but it’s also full of material history. Dad’s real photos are in the film, Dad’s real cameras, loaned by my brother. Foy wears the same falconry waistcoat I wore when I flew Mabel. To me these things were far more than props: they stitched past and present together, the story and the reality, Foy, Gleeson, me and Dad, with love. And in the end, this is a film that is about love of all kinds: familial, romantic, love between friends, love between human and non-human, love of landscape and all nature’s complicated beauty.

I’ve often been asked how the book changed me. I’m far softer than the person I was when I wrote it, and I suspect the film will make me softer still. When Plan B sent Foy, Lowthorpe and me to the Telluride Film Festival for the premiere, I stumbled through a small town thronging with A-list actors and directors to get to the packed movie theatre. I was a little wiped out from the jetlag and altitude, and watching it there, the film hit me differently: it was gentler in some ways, but far more devastating in others. I could hear people sob in the quieter moments, saw faces still wet as they left.

I remembered what readers had taught me in the years since the book came out, and the film was teaching it too. We are all fragile creatures whose lives are marked by grief, loss and times of great personal darkness, but together we share more than we lose, and our courses through life are buoyed and shaped by love.

“H Is for Hawk” is in cinemas from 23 January

[Further reading: No one wants Jim Steinman’s house]