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“I haven’t been called a spring chicken for a long time,” Hawes laughed, on a Zoom call from the U.K.

Still, it’s worth noting that Julie, the retired professional killer she plays in “The Assassin,” has some years and miles on her — rough ones, judging by the amount of hard liquor she drinks and her generally surly demeanour.

In one scene, she’s even popping a pill for menopause symptoms.

While I’m no expert on women assassins in TV and movies, I’m hard-pressed to think of another quiteÌýlikeÌýJulieÌý— “a perimenopausal James Bond,” as herÌýson, Edward, played by Freddie Highmore of “The Good Doctor,” quips.

Hawes acknowledged there was an attraction to playing an older woman with plenty of life experience who still physically kicks butt — something Julie does quite capably in the three episodes of “The Assassin” I previewed.Ìý

“She’s a breath of fresh air generally in terms of female characters and certainly a breath of fresh air for me to play,” Hawes said. “She’s just so authentic and so brash and says it like it is. And I do feel more and more, even though I’m a spring chicken, the older I get I relate to that. As soon as I started reading (the script), I just believed in this woman.”

The series — which debuts on Crave next week — finds Julie retired on a Greek island when Edward, with whom she has a prickly, standoffish relationship, arrivesÌýfrom England to visit. The reunion is interrupted when people from her past as a killer-for-hire reappear, forcing mother and son to go on the run.

If you’re familiar with the work of Harry and Jack Williams, the English brothers who created Australia-set thriller “The Tourist,”Ìýas well as “Liar” and “Angela Black,” you’ll be familiar with the mix of violence, mystery, character drama and humour in “The Assassin.”

Much of the action in the new series falls to Hawes as Julie, and she said she relished it, despite doing more onscreen fighting than she’s used to.

“It was almost like learning a dance, you’re learning different moves,” Hawes said of a particularly strenuous fight in the kitchen of a yacht in Episode 2. “It just makes your brain work in a different way.

“I worked with a brilliant stuntman during that scene, so what you see is me doing a lot of that scene, but he’s the one making it look good (with his coaching) … It’s a good scene and it’s funny.”

That mix of action and humour appealed to Highmore, 33, who, like Hawes, is a native of London, England. He began his career as a child actor (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”) before graduating to roles like serial killer Norman Bates in “Bates Motel” and an autistic surgeon in “The Good Doctor.”

Edward, he said, “is always sort of overthinking everything and doesn’t have the best responses to being in danger. Over the course of the show, he definitely has to learn some of those skills … but I think (he and Julie are) reluctantly in this position of being chased around Europe by people who want to kill them and I don’t think they’re ever like, ‘Bring it on, we want to take on the world,’ which gives it a lovely underlying sense of humour that I was going to describe as British, but having spent a lot of time in Canada I know is also quite Canadian as well,” said Highmore, who shot all seven seasons of “The Good Doctor” in Vancouver.

(Hawes has spent time in Canada too, having filmed the one-season “Orphan Black: Echoes” in Toronto.)

Highmore was also very keen to work with Hawes for the first time. “I’d admired her work for so long,” he said on the same Zoom call.

Hawes is one of those actors whose face you recognize even if you’re foggy on her name. (Also, she’s part of a British acting power couple; her husband of more than two decades is Emmy winner Matthew Macfadyen, a.k.a. Tom Wambsgans in “Succession.”)

Among her many, many roles, she has played a male impersonator ("Tipping the Velvet"); a spy ("MI-5"); an aristocrat ("Upstairs Downstairs"); a compromised cop ("Line of Duty"); a queen ("The Hollow Crown"); the British home secretary ("Bodyguard"); a widowed mother ("The Durrells"); Jane Austen's sister ("Miss Austen"), even Dr. Julia Ogden in a miniseries version of "Murdoch Mysteries" (today's TV Dr. Ogden, Hélène Joy, guest-starred in one episode).Ìý

Hawes said her “Line of Duty” character, Lindsay Denton, has something in common with Julie in that they’re both women who’ve done bad things but whom viewers root for.

“People still say, ‘God, I really love that character (Denton)’ or they really disliked her. But it’s great, you want people to feel something. And I feel like Julie is quite similar in that way, where you feel like you shouldn’t like her, but you can’t help it.

“I excuse the things that she has done in the past,” Hawes said, adding that you “have to have an understanding and a bit of empathy with your character.”

“So yeah, I love that aspect of her. She’s very complicated.”

Complicated is also an apt word for the relationship between Julie and Edward, who’s resentful about the fact his mother has never told him who his father is.

He’s “been left in the dark about a key piece of his upbringing. And I think he’s very valid in trying to find out who his father is. But we realize that he has been hiding a lot of things, too, and has definitely made quite a few mistakes and done some things that he now regrets,” Highmore said.

There seems to have been a rash of shows and movies lately about assassins or assassin-adjacent characters — “The Day of the Jackal,” “The Agency,” “Black Doves,” “The Killer,” “Hit Man” — but Hawes said the mother-son relationship is what differentiates “The Assassin.”

“It’s such a lovely package to be asked to do a show like this with such accomplished writers, alongside Freddie, who is absolutely brilliant and, on top of that, to be in Athens for five months of the year. It was just un-turn-downable,” said Hawes. “And it is high-octane, really exciting, all of the action stuff is great, but the really interesting thing to play, and to go into work and get to do every day, is the relationship between Julie and Edward at the heart of it.”

“The Assassin” streams on Crave beginning July 25 and on CTV Drama Channel July 28, with episodes Mondays at 9 p.m.