George MacKay: star takes a dark direction to explore masculinity

How dark do you want it?

In other ways, though, life has lightened. Good ways. MacKay and his Scottish wife, the make-up artist Doone Forsyth, now have two young children, after all, and MacKay is learning how to be a dad.

Is there a connection in all this? Actually, there is. Because fatherhood has made him begin to ask a lot of questions of himself and of society; questions about masculinity in particular. Hence his career choices of late.

“I wouldn’t say my masculinity is in crisis, but I’ve become very responsible in my life,” MacKay suggests as he sits in a nondescript office in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, cheekbones razor-sharp, accent as precise as only an English public school education can polish (in his case The Harrodian School in London). 

“And I think currently, socially,” he continues, “the values of established masculinity are being completely re-evaluated.

“This theme of masculinity seems really pertinent to me at the minute. So, that's why I think I’ve been drawn to these roles that are pulling apart what it is to be a man.”

That’s a lofty goal. Today we might settle for what it is to be George MacKay.

The actor has been on our screens since he was a 10-year-old kid in Peter Pan, released in 2003. But in the last few years he’s been visibly stretching his wings, seeing what he can do, pushing himself out of his comfort zone.

And in The Beast that has meant taking on the extremes of masculinity. Oh, and speaking in French, naturellement.

Today he sticks to English, which is just as well, as my French O level was a long time ago. It’s Glasgow in March and MacKay is in the city for the Scottish premiere of The Beast at the Glasgow Film Festival.

In Bonello’s movie MacKay actually has three roles across three time frames, playing opposite Lea Seydoux in all of them. There’s a 1910 story full of stiff collars, dolls, ill-fated flirting and floods, a mid-21st-century story about the impact of AI, and a rather David Lynchy take on 2014, inspired by the murderer Elliot Rodger who killed six people in a shooting and stabbing spree in California that year. 

MacKay’s own involvement in the film was itself the result of the most terrible of circumstances.

“I came into it off the back of a tragedy,” he admits. 

“The role was written for Gaspard Ulliel, who Bertrand had worked with on Saint Laurent,” MacKay points out, referring to Bonello’s 2014 take on the life of the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, in which Ulliel took the title role.

“They were great, great friends.”

Ulliel was due to play the roles MacKay plays in The Beast. “It was going to be Lea and Gaspard.”
But then Ulliel died, aged just 37, after a skiing accident in the Alps. The film was inevitably delayed as a result. But that gave Bonello time for a rethink on the casting. 

“I think it opened up his mind to look outside France,” Mackay says. “To avoid any sort of comparison. And that’s when I got the script to go for the audition.

“And I just loved it. I absolutely loved the script.”

How is your French, George? “I just about got through the GCSE. I did a lot of practice for this.”

For MacKay the film is about fear and how destructive it can be. Did he know about Elliot Rodger and his actions beforehand?

“I was aware of that. And, of course, you have pause for thought as to [the question] ‘Is there any glorification in this? Is this appropriate?’ 

“The Beast is a metaphor for fear and particularly the fear of love. And I do think there is some value in examining how destructive toxic fear can be. Because in Bertrand’s eyes part of the atrocities this real person committed was the result of his fear and turning inwards and it coming out so spitefully. I thought that was of value and that made it permissible.”

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To prepare he watched Rodger’s justificatory videos on YouTube. “The monologues are verbatim, pretty much. I definitely took quite a bit of his manner and his delivery.”

Is there a weight to carrying such horror?

“I think the weight comes in the decision to do it and then once you’ve decided, that’s it.”

Filming The Beast also allowed MacKay an insight into French film culture. He’s clearly a convert. “It was amazing. Everyone was really, really welcoming. I was sort of in awe of it.”

The French are different, he suggests. “I’m wary of talking broadly, but there’s a value in not talking about feelings over here in Britain. 

“You say, ‘How’s your day?’ And even if the world is falling apart at home, you say, ‘Yeah, it’s good.’ “But you ask a question over there, people really want to talk. It’s valued. It’s not valued if you don’t talk.

“And also,” he adds, jumping trains of thought, “to be somewhere where cinema is so revered. It was lovely to have such in-depth conversations and people be so passionate about film and what it means and what it is without being pretentious or fearing being pretentious.”

But before the French can claim him, maybe Scotland should put a bid in. There’s an argument for saying that Scotland helped make MacKay’s name. He worked in Scotland with Paul Wright on the director’s debut For Those in Peril (the pair are soon to reunite for Wright’s next film Mission, which will also be shot in Scotland). And, of course, MacKay got to try out his Scottish accent and sing Proclaimers’ songs on the film version of the jukebox musical Sunshine on Leith. 

He’s not averse to the idea. “My wife’s Scottish. I’ll take it. I want to be Scottish. I’ve got the surname.”

How has fatherhood changed him?

“It has just expanded stuff. The beauty is, all of that said, we’ve just got kids now … It’s too big a question, almost too personal a question to answer.”

Well, what has he learned about himself?

“I’m good if I have a cup of coffee before they wake.”

We are meeting just a few days before his 32nd birthday. Which means he now has two decades of film credits to his name already. George, why do you act?

“I didn’t think very much about it. I just loved it as a kid. I’ll try to think of a more profound answer, but I did it when I was 10 and I had the best time on the first project I did, which was Peter Pan.

“I learnt you can make a living out of this and then you grow to understand the profundity of a really good story, or exploring different stuff, of art, of being creative, of trying to see different sides of what it is to be alive.

“But at the heart of it, I just loved it. I was very lucky to fall into it and I just loved it and now I feel very blessed to call it my work and I f****** love my work.”

Maybe that’s all you really need to know about George MacKay. He’s a man who likes his job. That makes him man enough, doesn’t it?

The Beast is in selected cinemas now