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I made screencaps of Thomasin in the film “Old”. Click on the gallery link below to see all caps from the film.
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
Click on the gallery link below to see the photos full size.
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.
I made screencaps of Thomasin in one of her earlier projects, “Existence”. Click on the gallery link below to see all screencaps of her in the film.
The star of M. Knight Shyamalan’s new thriller, Old, defies the adage that youth is wasted on the young.
Thomasin McKenzie is only 21 years old, but lately she’s been thinking a lot about the passing of time. “I think I’m someone who really struggles to be in the moment,” says the actress, who stars in Old, the new M. Night Shyamalan thriller. Recently, at her father’s urging, McKenzie took up meditation. (Sam Harris’s Waking Up is her favorite guided app.) Working on Old, the story of a family whose tropical island vacation turns terrifying when everyone suddenly begins to age rapidly (their life spans each reduced to a single day), helped put things in perspective too. “It made me think a lot about being present and taking each thing as it comes.”
For McKenzie, time is a recurring theme right now. In Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, a psychological thriller in which she stars opposite Anya Taylor-Joy, due out in October, she plays a young woman who is mysteriously transported back to Swinging London in the 1960s. In Life After Life, the BBC’s upcoming four-part adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s novel of the same name, McKenzie’s character dies and is reborn several times over the course of six decades. “Maybe I’m just supposed to be thinking about time these days,” she muses. “Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.”
McKenzie auditioned with Shyamalan for her role in Old over Zoom. It was the early days of the pandemic, and she was hunkered down in her native Wellington, New Zealand. “It was quite awkward,” she recalls. “But obviously it went good enough for him.” McKenzie then had two hours to read the script in its entirety as Shyamalan’s projects are famously shrouded in secrecy. “It’s thought-provoking and unlike anything I’d ever read or seen before,” she says. And while a Zoom audition may have been new territory for McKenzie, acting is in her blood: Her mom is actor and drama coach Miranda Harcourt, her father is the writer and director Stuart McKenzie, and her maternal grandmother is actor Kate Harcourt. The third of four children, McKenzie grew up on far-flung movie sets around the world, from Philadelphia to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. “I think if my family weren’t in the film industry, my life would have been completely different,” she says. “It’s really formed who I am as a person.”
McKenzie herself started acting when she was nine, learning through osmosis rather than through any formal training. Initially, though, she wanted nothing to do with the family business. “I knew that it wasn’t as glamorous a job as you might expect from the outside,” she says. “I wanted to be anything else.” It wasn’t until she was 13, when she played a younger version of sexual-abuse survivor and activist Louise Nicholas in the 2014 film Consent, that she saw the power of storytelling to effect change and decided to pursue acting as a career. “It was a really tough role, and that opened my eyes to the fact that through acting, you get a chance to have a voice.”
It was after starring in Debra Granik’s 2018 film Leave No Trace that McKenzie’s career began to take off. (Granik has a reputation as a star-maker; her 2010 drama, Winter’s Bone, featured a then-little-known actress by the name of Jennifer Lawrence.) A string of critically acclaimed projects followed—David Michôd’s The King; Liz Garbus’s Lost Girls; and Taika Waititi’s Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit among them. McKenzie’s measured performances consistently stand out, subtle—quiet even—yet soulful and impactful.
McKenzie is building her career by studiously choosing projects that have emotional heft and telegraph larger messages. She’s a compulsive over-preparer. “I’m always scrambling to watch the things that they’re talking about, just so that I come off smart or whatever,” she tells me.
Before filming Last Night in Soho, the director, Wright, sent her a list of some 50 films—horror, classic, and cult, mainly—as suggested viewing to add context and reference points to McKenzie’s preparation; she made it through most of them. “Education is still happening, I feel,” she says. “I’m still learning a lot with every single thing I do.”
I added photoshoot outtakes to two albums in the gallery. Click on the gallery links below to see all new photos.
I added 15 new photos to the gallery of Thomasin filming outside Basingstoke church for BBC drama Life After Life on 28 June. Click on the gallery link below to see all photos.
