I made screencaps of Thomasin in the film ” Last Night in Soho”. Click on the gallery link below to see all caps from the film.
Films & Television > 2020 – Last Night in Soho > Screencaps
“Collaboration makes me really happy,” Thomasin McKenzie tells us. “I just finished a production and the relationship I had with the director and the entire crew and cast was so joyful and loving and collaborative. That made me so happy because it’s what I love the most.”
We’re meeting the New Zealand actress in London as she prepares to promote her lead role in the upcoming Edgar Wright thriller, Last Night in Soho – so where more fitting for our interview and shoot than that same energetic London neighbourhood? After effortlessly waltzing her way through a series of photos at the Parisian restaurant Brasserie Zédel, we’re now comfortably ensconced in the luxury of the Hotel Café Royal, one of Soho’s longest-established mainstays.
McKenzie is arguably best-known for her supporting roles in the award-winning Jojo Rabbit and the action-packed True History of the Kelly Gang, as well as her breakout appearance in in Debra Granik’s 2018 drama Leave No Trace, for which she received much critical acclaim. It’s her quietly captivating, chameleon-like qualities as an actor which allows for her to take on such varying roles with an ease that belies her 21 years.
“The best career advice I’ve ever received is a piece of advice from my mum,” she explains. “It was life advice, but now I take it as career advice, and that is to be like water in a stream – flowing freely and easily past obstacles or ‘rocks’ – and just not being too taken aback or stopped in your tracks by things, but being able to move around them and continue on with your life.”
That concept of fluidity and flexibility is clearly something that appeals to McKenzie, who describes her idea of self-care as “stillness, and not feeling the pressure of time”, and says that her ideal superpower would be “the ability to transform into absolutely anything”.
“With that power, you basically have all the powers,” she points out. “You could be a bird, you could be a fish, you could be a chameleon, you could be an elf. I could live out my dream of being a fairy.”
So, with Last Night in Soho garnering huge levels of press and attention ahead of its release, putting her firmly on the map as an in-demand leading lady, what would advice would she give her younger self, who was just starting out as an emerging teenage actress?
“Just not to care so much, and to be gentler on myself,” she says, thoughtfully. “Because life is joyful and not everything is such a big deal. You’ll survive.”
Watch our full video interview with McKenzie above, in which she reveals what makes her happiest, her unusual party trick, the most luxurious purchases she’s ever made, and the job that changed her life.
Thomasin attended the Focus Features Los Angeles Premiere Of Last Night In Soho two day ago, on 25 October. Click on the gallery link below to see all new photos.
Candids, Events & Premieres > 2021 > 2021-10-25 – Focus Features Los Angeles Premiere Of Last Night In Soho
The ascendant actress discusses entering the dark side of 1960s Soho in Edgar Wright’s new chiller
Rachel Louise Brown for Esquire
The actress Thomasin McKenzie is an introverted performer, imbuing her characters with a quiet intensity rather than fighting for the camera’s attention. “It takes a lot of effort from me to be‘ big’,” she tells Esquire over Zoom, from her family home in Wellington, New Zealand. “Even when I feel like I’m doing a massive performance, I watch the film and it’s so much smaller than it felt in my head.”
For her next role, the 21-year-old, who is endearingly sweet yet preternaturally sage, in the way actors who have worked alongside adults from a young age sometimes are, had no choice: she had to go big. McKenzie leads the cast of the flamboyant horror film Last Night in Soho, a technicolour extravaganza from Edgar Wright, the treasured British director behind Shaun of the Dead and Baby Driver. The actress plays Eloise, a goofy aspiring fashion designer who dreams of moving to London. Once there, she is transported to the Swinging Sixties where she encounters Sandy (played by the similarly elfin actress Anya Taylor-Joy, who screams, sobs and smokes with the same vigour as she did in the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit), only to find the fluorescent lights and glamour of the city are a garish nightmare from up close.
McKenzie is the daughter of an actress, Miranda Harcourt, and a director, Stuart McKenzie, and the granddaughter of another actress, Dame Kate Harcourt. Her early years in New Zealand were spent running around the acting school where her mother taught. A savvy nine-year-old, she initially entered the family business as a side-hustle, performing for pocket money so that she could buy new toys. “I used to collect erasers, which are rubbers but I call them erasers because in America rubbers are condoms and it’s not a good look to say you’re collecting condoms,” she laughs. “I was really obsessed with Sylvanian Families, too.”
McKenzie’s breakout role came in Debra Granik’s 2018 Leave No Trace, about a PTSD-afflicted father who lives off-grid in the woods with his daughter, a part McKenzie fit so perfectly that, watching the film, it feels as though Granik had come across McKenzie by searching the forest before they started filming. The director pulled off the same trick once before, plucking a teenaged Jennifer Lawrence from obscurity for the revered Winter’s Bone. McKenzie’s performance in Leave No Trace earned her comparisons to Lawrence, a strange thing for an 18-year-old who had grown up on The Hunger Games to contend with. Admired performances in Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit and M Night Shyamalan’s Old followed, and now her slate of upcoming projects features some of the biggest names in filmmaking.
McKenzie was shooting her compatriot Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, about a pair of warring brothers on a ranch in Montana, when the pandemic halted production in early 2020. She went back to stay with her family in New Zealand, settling into a bubble far away from the noise she had grown accustomed to. “After Leave No Trace it was hard to take stock,” she says.“The lockdown was a great moment to pause and reassess what kind of stuff I wanted to do. I don’t do films because of how big they might be, I’m just living every day.”
Last Night in Soho is Wright’s love letter to London’s most louche and libidinous enclave, which dazzled him as a teenage boy from Dorset. The closing credits feature shots of the city captured during the pandemic, when the streets were terrifyingly empty and the pubs were —more terrifyingly still — shuttered. “It paints a good picture of what Soho is: the good and the bad,” McKenzie says of the film. Wright issued a list of 1960s films for her to make her way through to get a sense of the tone he wanted, with horror classics like Polanski’s Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, as well as British kitchen-sink dramas Poor Cow and A Taste of Honey all featuring. “I’m not naturally a horror watcher,” she says. “He had [Dario Argento’s terrifying 1977 film] Suspiria on the list but I couldn’t do it. It didn’t sound like my cup of tea.”
Last Night in Soho is in cinemas 31 Oct
I added 37 new “Last Night In Soho” HQ stills of Thomasin to the gallery! Click on the gallery link below to go see all “Last Night in Soho” stills.
Films & Television > 2020 – Last Night in Soho > Behind the Scenes, Promotional Photos and Stills
Across a handful of screen roles, Thomasin McKenzie has announced herself as a major new performer to watch – she was captivating in Leave No Trace, formidable in Jojo Rabbit, and now she’s leading a very different kind of Edgar Wright movie in Last Night In Soho. The film marks Wright’s first major move into psychological horror, swapping the Cornetto gags and souped-up action of Scott Pilgrim and Baby Driver for a mind-bending, time-bending, neon-lit trawl through the central London neighbourhood. In the middle of it all is McKenzie’s Eloise, a wannabe fashionista who forges a mysterious connection back to the 1960s and Anya Taylor-Joy’s singer Sandy. Here’s a moody new shot of McKenzie in the film, as seen in Empire’s upcoming issue.
“It’s genuinely something I’ve never seen before,” says McKenzie of Wright’s latest, hinting at plenty of twists in the plot – which remains tightly under wraps for now. “Very unique. I love things where you’re reading a script, and you know where it’s going, and then it just goes in a completely different direction.” And it seems there are surprises in store from Eloise herself too. “She’s almost got kind of a sixth sense,” she teases. “She can feel things that are on another level that most people can’t see or feel.”
Last Night In Soho is written by Wright and 1917’s Krysty Wilson-Cairns, and after a number of lockdown-induced delays we’ll finally see what the seedy streets of Soho have in store on 29 October.
