F L A U N T

George Mackay greets Flaunt over video call on a bright, early summer’s day from the Isle of Wight—a small island situated just off the south coast of England and the location of MacKay’s family’s home. “It’s beautiful down here,” the actor beams. “Blue skies, sea, just blue and green everywhere really.” It’s the first time his family have managed to get together since the UK’s latest lockdown. “Everybody is together for the first time since then,” he smiles, savoring the warmth and quietude while he awaits his next big part. “I’m feeling very lucky to be here with them.”

MacKay is someone who knows all about big parts, as his recent lead roles in Sam Mendes’ Oscar-winning 1917 and Justin Kurzel’s daring True History of the Kelly Gang illustrate. He spent part of last year working on another, too—Nathalie Biancheri’s Wolf, in which he plays a character who thinks he’s a wolf trapped in a human body. “My phone is filled with some very strange videos of me crawling around my flat,” MacKay laughs, explaining the process of trying to embody a wolf who was, at times, a clumsy one. “I actually used to get up early, before any dog-walkers were out, and go and crawl around the park outside,” he laughs, reddening at the revelation. “But of course, someone would suddenly appear. I’d quickly jump back onto my two feet and pretend I was just stretching.” Did they buy it? “Absolutely not,” he laughs again.

Going to extremes when preparing for a role isn’t something new for MacKay. Take True History of the Kelly Gang. The intense preparation for his lead role as famous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly (a role previously played by the late Heath Ledger and The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger) took months and involved everything from working as a ranch hand on an Australian farm to forming a punk band with fellow cast members Earl Cave, Sean Keenan, and Jacob Collins-Levy. “I spoke to Justin, and he was like, ‘Right, you’re going to come out to Australia, you’re going to stay here for months, you’re going to work on a ranch, you’re going to chop wood, you’re going to change your body shape...’ He also wanted to change how I looked, how I talked, my demeanor—he gave me this manifesto of stuff to do for months beforehand, and it was this massive learning process.” Did he feel daunted by such a long list of requests? Quite the opposite, he says. “I would have never thought up Justin’s incredible version of Ned. When the [script] came, I remember thinking, ‘I want this so much, I’ll do anything for it,’ not just for who the part was, but because of how it was going to be made. It was extraordinary.”

MacKay had previously auditioned for a role in Kurzel’s 2015 film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, (starring Marion Cotillard and Michael Fassbender), although he didn’t land the part. When another chance to work with the acclaimed director came around, he was thrilled. “His film Snowtown was the most affected I have ever been in a cinema,” MacKay says. “I woke up with that film the next day. I had the chance of auditioning for Justin for one of the roles in Macbeth, and he really put me through my paces. I’d have done anything to work with Justin, so when the role of Ned came about, it was amazing.”

MacKay is from a breed of New Wave British actors whose roles are chosen by a desire to push the boundaries of storytelling, to ask challenging questions about identity, and leave audiences with more questions than answers via stories that start important cultural conversations. When reading Kurzel’s script, he realized the part wasn’t only the opportunity to play one of the world’s most famous outlaws, but it was one which would enable him (and others from similar roots) to explore his family’s heritage more—not to mention one that explored the very nature of storytelling itself through truths, fictions, and legends.

“I was at a point in my mid-twenties thinking about what it was to be a man,” he replies thoughtfully, recalling the moment when Kurzel’s script landed on his desk. “You feel like you’ve got one foot close to your family, another foot stepping out on your own. This role explored masculinity, legacies and heritages too. I felt a bit rootless [at the time]. My dad’s Australian, but I grew up in England.”

MacKay continues: “With Ned, I only knew the name. It wasn’t until I read Peter Carey’s book [on which the film was based] that I realized he was of Irish heritage. I’m embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t taken in enough about Australia’s colonial heritage as a young boy [at school]. I learned a lot about Irish and Scottish settlers who arrived on this indigenous land, which was being taken and broken up, about penal colonies too. My dad had Irish roots and [it made me think] about how important Ned’s Irish identity was to him and how fundamental that was to the bad reputation he got, or perhaps because of the English Protestant Law he came up against.”

MacKay went over to see his Australian relatives, who playfully vetted his Australian accent prior to filming. He’d been practicing for weeks, he says, before the visit. When he arrived, his uncles approved his accent but started to talk about Ned being a bastion of the “uber-man”— something that unnerved MacKay, who was keen to deconstruct such fixed notions of masculinity. “I was feeling a bit like, ‘Oh I’m not good enough,’ that thing of meeting other people and them going, ‘Oh yes, George is going to play Ned’ and them being like ‘Oh, fucking hell!’ But I went away and Justin said: ‘Let’s completely redo it.’”

Kurzel and MacKay decided to tear up preconceptions of masculinity so much so that Ned and his gang morphed into a cross-dressing group of outlaws with a punk spirit at their core. “His idea was to make the film with the attitude that he thinks those boys would’ve had. They’re railing against this thing of ‘You’re telling me I’m this, and I’m telling you that I’m not.’ The gang was going to be these angry, punky, 18–25-year-olds. Justin said, ‘Fuck it—we’re going to have them wear dresses, play electric guitars, and make a film in the attitude of the [original gang], a film they would’ve enjoyed themselves,” MacKay explains, rather than a picture that was bogged down by obsessing too rigidly on accuracy, or one that stuck to standardized norms and ‘truths.’ “Justin said: ‘Let’s get rid of the history, let’s completely re-do it’, so we did.”

This decision became especially useful when it came to growing Ned’s beard, MacKay jokes. “I can’t grow a beard,” he reveals, covering his face with his hands in embarrassment. “There was a bit of weight about going to my Australian relatives without a proper beard. I’d been trying to grow one for two months, and it genuinely looked like a ginger eyebrow,” he grimaces, tracing the outline of an imaginary eyebrow below his lip. “I remember Justin saying, ‘Grow a beard,’ and in the initial script that I received, literally the first stage direction for the man’s section was: ‘Ned, 24: a mighty beard,’ and I was like, ‘Oh fuck!’” After months in Australia not shaving, working on a ranch, and chopping wood, MacKay presented Kurzel with his beard-growing efforts. “I was like, ‘Justin, this is it, I haven’t shaved.’ He was like, ‘That’s it?’ and all the while he’s saying this with a black beard down to here,” he says, pointing below his chin to where Kurzel’s impressive beard ended. Thankfully, MacKay kept the part, and his Ned was re-imagined with a mullet instead. “It was a relief,” he laughs.

What about his upcoming role as Jacob in Wolf—will he be sprouting more hair for his turn as a man who thinks he is a werewolf? “At no point does anyone spout any hair or anything like that,” he says, breathing a comedic sigh of relief. MacKay began filming Wolf alongside Lily-Rose Depp after the first lockdown in the UK last year, with all the cast and crew bubbling together in a hotel to stay safe. MacKay said lockdown gave him extra time to prepare for the part, something that came in handy for the role’s “physicality,” he says. As well as crawling around the park on all fours, he used lockdown to “develop the character for two and a half months,” part of which involved him writing a daily diary entry in the voice of his character in order to “explain his inner thoughts.”

As well as spending weeks writing diary entries, MacKay also spent a long time doing intense physical training with famed movement coach Terry Notary, whose previous work includes stints on Avatar, Planet of the Apes and with Cirque du Soleil. “He’s an amazing man,” MacKay enthuses, saying

that Notary put him through his paces daily. “Before we got into all the howling and crawling and all of that kind of stuff, it was important for us that he’s not just a man doing an impression of a wolf. We needed to make the wolf his center—we needed to work out what the essence of the animal was first.”

MacKay further elaborates: “My character feels that he is a wolf, and he feels that he is a wolf trapped in a man’s body. What I love about the film is that it’s incredibly ambiguous... it never lands hard on whether he is a wolf or he isn’t, without giving too much away. He feels he absolutely is, but he is unequivocally in a man’s body, and he’s met with that challenge of who he is all the time. People around him are trying to therapize him, to ‘correct’ him.”

MacKay said he was drawn to the script because of how “strange, thought-provoking, and fascinating” it was, feeling that it helped to ask many questions about identity that we all can relate to. “Where does anyone’s identity begin? Is it what other people deem you to be, or what you deem yourself to be? How much is what you deem yourself to be in relationship with what others deem you to be, and how much you’re also unequivocally what you are.” MacKay says the film, which he thinks leans towards the “arthouse,” is another that leaves more questions than answers.

Every film for MacKay is about a learning experience—for him and the audience. You can see why. His answers to questions are considered, thoughtful, and he tries to see how a character is received across many different audiences and generations—something that can only come from spending a long time developing his craft, understanding characters, and working with varied directors. It’s the reason, he adds, why he has taken on so many varied roles in his career to date. “I really enjoy learning different ways of working, because it’s a different way of expressing yourself each time, a different challenge to try, like learning a new skill under the umbrella of acting,” he says. “Over time, it’s been a bit more of a conscious awareness of what a project might teach me as well, as in, I love learning about the context of characters through research—or even building your own context—which helps you to realize how fundamental that is to a person’s understanding of the world.”

“I think the more I’ve done that,” MacKay continues, “the more it’s broadened my understanding of the world. My understanding of the world is still growing and changing all the time. I find these discoveries really beautiful and exciting—and projects that ask me to learn that—well, it’s reason to go for something. I think you connect to things at different points in time as well, because of different things you want to learn, where you are in your own life. Everyone in a way, including the director, is facilitating a story, they’re facilitating an offering of what the story is—the story is an offering of something, it’s not necessarily an answer, but it’s an offering of an experience which might prompt a conversation.”

MacKay began his acting career at the tender age of eleven, when he was spotted at West London’s The Harrodian School by a talent scout. He was cast as Curly, one of the Lost Boys in the 2003 live-action adaptation of Peter Pan. Directed by PJ Hogan, MacKay found himself spending eight and a half months in Australia; as well as being his first time away for such a long time, it was the first time he’d spent time with the Australian side of his family at length. “As a first experience, it was really overwhelming and massive, and I’ve never done a job like it since, as well, being away for such a long time. But we were so well looked after.”

MacKay was enjoying his early lessons in drama at school when casting director Shaheen Baig visited the school. “She was just going around and doing agency searches, drama class searches and just picking out boys and girls to go to various workshops. I was so lucky. I was in a group of kids from my school that were picked to go to one particular workshop, and it wound up being three boys from my school who got parts as Lost Boys.” He flew out to Australia with his mum and sister soon after and says his memories of this first ever acting job are dream-like. “We just had the most amazing time—I can’t imagine a better first experience. The world and the story were magical, and I was surrounded by other kids who, like me, were having their first go at all this.”

MacKay’s parents encouraged him, but never pushed. “They were always very sweet and giving,” he smiles, his pride in his family feeling effusive. “They were easy about just supporting me, never over-egging anything.” His parents sought out a trusted family friend for advice about finding MacKay an agent when he expressed an interest in wanting to continue his acting work after Peter Pan. He was signed soon after. The agency focussed on the career of adults, rather than children and MacKay found himself being put up for parts in more serious roles, one of which was alongside Daniel Craig in Defiance as Aron Bielski. “Of the projects I got from this agency, I was usually on jobs surrounded by adults, working on more mature stories. I got to learn a lot unconsciously, because I was just around adults all of the time.” It might explain why he was able to take on such developed roles in his early twenties in the proceeding years, each of which saw him getting more exposure as the parts grew bigger and more challenging.

Standouts include his role alongside Saoirse Ronan in teen drama How I Live Now, his performance as closeted gay activist, Joe, in Pride, and as singing ex-soldier Davy in Sunshine On Leith. It was his turn as Lance Corporal Schofield in Sam Mendes’ Oscar winning 1917 that MacKay became a household name. “That was my first time at the Oscars,” he beams. “It was an amazing night, thrilling—one of those once in a lifetime moments.” Like his other roles, MacKay says he learned much from the experience—not least a new style of working after Mendes presented the film as one continuous shot. “To play Schofield was such an honor. I couldn’t have dreamt up the way Sam wanted to make the film. It was a blessing to be a part of something that was received so well—it’s a very special and rare scenario.”

MacKay often looks and sounds like someone who doesn’t quite believe his luck (he continually repeats how “lucky” he is to get parts): but suggest to him that it’s surely his talent and not luck and he reddens, quickly changing the subject. MacKay tried to study at two of the UK’s most prestigious drama schools—RADA and LAMDA—but he was rejected from both. Is that where some of the reluctance to talk about talent comes from? He says not, explaining that he’s inadvertently had drama school training anyway, albeit in a roundabout way, from the fellow actors he’s worked with. “So much of what I’ve learned on-set has been through people who went to drama school—a fellow actor doing a technique or exercise that they’ve learnt. Having not gone to drama school, I was always hungry to learn... I got to go to drama school through them really.”

He continues, “I think just whichever way you can learn is great—there is no right answer.You need to feel confident in what you do know, but also embrace that feeling of ‘I don’t know this stuff, so I’m going to listen and learn.’ Watching actors who have done a lot of theatre, they use words differently to actors who haven’t, because they have a command that’s been taught or learned at drama school. I think I’ve borrowed bits and bobs from lots of different people over the years. Just asking questions and watching people, and listening to anecdotes when someone sits there and has a cup of tea, and either tells a story from a job that they’ve had or talks about something that they admire. There’s so much chatting on-set that I just remember: a lot of it is hearing conversations and learning from it.”

MacKay also credits British actor Eddie Marsan as being a mentor to him in his twenties. “He is the most amazing actor,” MacKay says, remembering the time they appeared in The Best Of Men together. “I [learned] so many things through the way he operated—his respect for everyone on the crew, his self-respect in his work, his confidence.” He recalls Marsan speaking in accent the entire time they were on set together, something that MacKay himself was nervous about doing prior to seeing Marsan. “I think back then, maybe I was worried about being self-conscious—if you feel you need to get het up for a scene and not wanting to seem like an idiot for doing it.” He adds that Marsan gave him the confidence to try new methods on set.

MacKay had another challenging learning experience recently filming Munich, which is set for release via Netflix later this year. He’s no stranger to a film with a backdrop of conflict (Private Peaceful, Defiance, Where Hands Touch, 1917) and now Munich has pre-WW2 as its initial backdrop. Directed by Christian Schwochow, MacKay saw a cut of the film recently and finished his ADR shortly before our interview. “I’m really, really proud and excited by what I saw,” he smiles. “It’s basically the year before the Second World War,” MacKay begins, explaining the film’s premise. “It’s based on a Robert Harris novel, and it’s a dual thriller. There are two separate narratives that eventually intertwine.”

The film explores the political events that led up to WW2, something he spent hours researching before filming began. “To me, it is a discussion on how to do something about a situation that you know to be wrong and dangerous, and there being two schools of thought essentially. There is the physical, the radical, and the immediate, and then there is the legislation, essentially. Doing things by the book, or doing things by the sword—and both have their truths—both have their validity.” He says the film is about “the realities of both, the reality of taking action in your own hands, protesting with your own body and soul, rather than just signing a petition or joining a march, and also writing policy and getting legislation pushed through that will appease nations.” MacKay plays a man called Hugh who works as someone on the “bottom rung” of Neville Chamberlin’s “inner-circle,” an “undersecretary.” Hugh’s best friend from university, Paul, meanwhile, is his equivalent but in the Nazi party in Germany. Both are working to depose Adolf Hitler, but in very different ways.

MacKay says much of the political rhetoric of the film will chime with the populist politics of now. “The Trump- Biden election was taking place as we were filming Munich,” he says. “The discussions on nationalism, national identity... it’s eerily equivalent to a lot of what’s going on in the world, of populist politics, of nationalism born out of a fear of losing your own identity because of a situation that you felt out of control of in the first place. The film looks at how we get close to [terrible] situations like this happening and how we can prevent them. It felt eerily contemporary and equivalent to a lot of what’s going on now.”

MacKay’s natural curiosity is evident as he reels off facts he discovered in his research for the role—so, too, is his knowledge of the craft of writing and directing, two skills he’s hoping to hone in the near future. “I would love to direct,” he says. “I think [in the future], there’s going to be a mixture of me being a bit more proactive about learning and not being scared to try and to give time to that, but also I feel so lucky and thankful with the opportunities I’m able to have in acting at the minute—I want to try and give myself to those opportunities. The more work that I’m lucky enough to do, I just love the gaining a more three-dimensional understanding of storytelling. I really enjoy learning about how the entire engine works.”

MacKay also says that he’s had a go at writing in his spare time too. “I was writing in a few different forms, but one thing was towards a screenplay,” he reveals. “I’m not a professional writer and it’s only me asking myself to do it—sometimes for better or for worse—sometimes the process of trying to figure that out would mean it would go off sideways, and you’d end up writing other things, streams of consciousness for a character in that script or something. It just became about writing things down.” He’s excited to see what emerges the more he delves into this creative side of himself.

Lastly, MacKay is asked what he enjoys doing in between filming? “Just shaving every night for three hours,” he deadpans, stroking his smooth, stubble-free chin. While we’re unlikely to see him on screen anytime soon with a beard, we are likely to see him in something typically daring and challenging—and a role that, like his others, he’s taken a long time to consider. For now, he’s just enjoying time with his family and the blue seas surrounding the Isle of Wight. He’s about to set sail on the island’s sea as our conversation comes to an end, embarking on yet another exciting adventure out on the great horizon.

Photographer: Danny Kasirye at ADB Agency
Stylist: Michael Miller at Stella Creative Artists
Groomer: Petra Sellge at The Wall Group with Dior Beauty
Location: Hotel Cafe Royal, London
Groomer Assistant: Frankie Neal
Videographer: Alyn Horton