George MacKay reaches into his backpack and pulls out a squeezy bottle of honey, squirting it into his americano. “It’s a bit eccentric,” he says sheepishly. He picked up the habit years ago on a shoot in Australia; recognising that requesting a pot of honey might be perceived as “a slightly wanky ask”, he carries his own supply instead. This is typical MacKay – charming, discreet, and more than a little concerned about giving others the wrong idea.
On screen, MacKay frequently plays characters who are suffocated by the codes of traditional masculinity, and turned cruel by them, too. The actor’s breakout role was in Sam Mendes’s Oscar-winning war blockbuster 1917, which plays out as one dizzying, unbroken shot. MacKay’s face – vulnerable, determined, devastated – carried the film’s home stretch. Since then, he has veered towards grittier projects, portraying an angry, closeted thug (the subversive Femme, for which he won a British independent film award), a man who believes he’s a wild animal (Wolf) and a macho outlaw dressed in drag (True History of the Kelly Gang). Today, upstairs at the BFI Southbank and overlooking the Thames, we’re discussing MacKay’s new film, The Beast. A brilliant, demented techno-thriller co-starring Léa Seydoux, it is directed by French provocateur Bertrand Bonello, and loosely based on the Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle.
