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.
The film follows a doomed romance between Gabrielle (Seydoux) and Louis (MacKay) across three different timelines: Paris, in 1910, just prior to the Great Flood; in Los Angeles, circa 2014; and in 2044, when the majority of Paris’s workforce has been replaced by artificial intelligence. In this future dystopia, humans must undergo a medical procedure (it involves a bathtub filled with black goo) that wipes them of the ability to feel emotions, in order to better compete with the machines.
Bonello had written the part of Louis for the French actor Gaspard Ulliel, with whom he worked on 2014’s Saint Laurent. But after Ulliel died in a skiing accident in 2022, Bonello began looking outside France for a replacement. MacKay says he “scraped past GCSE French” but hadn’t touched it since. He read the script in translation, auditioned in English, and then set about learning French for the role.
The prospect of playing opposite one of France’s best working actors was “nerve-racking at first, because obviously she’s Léa Seydoux”. MacKay wanted to master the language, not just the lines. “I didn’t want my offering to her to be the same every time,” he says. He came to set prepared; Seydoux was impressed. “The very first day of filming, Léa smiled at me, and said: ‘It’s fun to play in French, non?’” he says, grinning.
Across time and space, Seydoux’s character navigates deserted discotheques, freaky plastic dolls and an “incel” who is silently stalking her. In all three dimensions, Gabrielle finds herself haunted by an ineffable sense of dread – a “beast” that keeps her isolated, and halts her from falling in love. According to MacKay, the couple are drawn to one another because of their shared “fear of love”.
In the film’s 1910 section – a gorgeous, widescreen period drama shot in 35mm film – Louis’s romantic reticence is an asset, given the rules and repression of the time. “He was still erotic and flirtatious, because touching someone’s hand illicitly is as charged as going home with them,” says MacKay. In the 2014 section, Bonello bombards the screen with internet pop-ups. Unable to live up to the expectations created by social media, Louis’s shyness curdles into incel self-loathing and spite. And then there’s future Louis, who contemplates having those anxieties erased.
In the film’s 2014 section, MacKay’s dialogue is lifted verbatim from the video diaries of Elliot Rodger, the 22-year old “incel” who shot six students and then himself the same year. MacKay plays Louis Lewanski, coldly inhabiting the misogyny of a self-hating adult virgin. Before making the film, he didn’t know what an incel was (“I thought that was a tech term because they gamed or something, I didn’t realise it meant involuntary celibate”), and had never heard of Rodger. He based his character on Rodger’s YouTube vlogs, and looked up his 137-page manifesto. “The fears he had: being a teenager and being like, ‘What if I kiss someone and it’s bad? What if I’m not good at sex?’ I identified with those worries,” he says.
Although he’s clear that he doesn’t condone Rodger’s behaviour, he understood the seed of it, which he says grew into something dark and vicious. A similar rage grips MacKay’s character in Femme, who is also driven to violence by his own sexual shame. “Femme is certainly about inner subversion,” he says, of his macho character Preston, whose gruff, tattooed exterior belies an attraction to Nathan Stewart-Jarrett’s drag queen, Jules.
“I think I had quite a traditional sense of masculinity in terms of the men that I admired growing up,” says MacKay. His father was the family breadwinner, working backstage in the theatre, while his mum, a costume designer, ran their home. “Him being away a lot was a physical representation of how hard he worked. I’ve always thought that’s what a man does,” he says.
As a kid, he says, he never saw his dad cry. But in 2002, MacKay got his first big job as one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. The shoot was in Australia. “I was 10, and when he took us to the airport, he wept. I remember being rocked by seeing my dad cry,” he says. “My mum says: ‘The best thing about your dad is how in touch with his feminine side he is,’” he adds, describing that sensitivity as a quality he reveres.
MacKay, who is 32, has been exploring what it means to be a man in his work, he says, “because my role as a man is changing massively”. He has recently become a parent, and has been noticing “a complete recalibration of what’s positive about masculinity in the last decade”. Strength, leadership, endurance – these are no longer thought of as a man’s domain, he says. He cites his wife, mother, sister and agent as examples, and then cringes, worried he’s coming off as patronising. He’s been asking himself why he feels the need to be a certain way as a father. “Now I’ve experienced how sometimes work can be easier than your personal life, I can see my mum was a leader, too,” he says.
The Beast is a slinky and anxious film, borrowing tropes from slasher horror, disaster movies and science fiction to create something entirely new. MacKay says he finds the film’s imagined future its most disturbing setting. With its empty streets and beige clothes, Bonello’s 2044 is devoid of friction. AI has cleansed humans of their ability to feel.
When the film premiered at the Venice film festival last year, it was in the middle of the Sag-Aftra labour strike that saw screen actors and writers fighting for, among other things, better protections against AI. Both MacKay and Seydoux refused to cross the picket line. “If, facially, you can be repeated, and you don’t need to get actors on set, it takes away the crew that comes with physical filming,” he says animatedly. It takes away people’s jobs, too. “Which is why economically it makes sense to the studios,” he says, “but it’s a detriment to the workers.”
MacKay’s principles are clear; he’s got the floppy hair and sharp cheekbones of someone destined for Hollywood, but keeps getting drawn to spikier and more difficult roles. For him, the whole point of The Beast is “challenging this algorithmic way of writing”. He notes that its structure is unusual, as is the way it looks, and its three timelines. And while it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, MacKay says, he hopes it will provoke at least one more writer to think outside the box. “Maybe they’ll go: ‘When I write my film, I’ll do it in five time zones,’ and then they write a fucking masterpiece.” MacKay may even star in it.
The Beast is out in cinemas 31 May.
