George MacKay is probably the best British actor working today. Not that anyone yells about it. The tabloids leave him alone. No Gen-Z’ers are following him about Shoreditch bars. It’s almost like he’s not sensational in everything he does, not the leading man in Sam Mendes’ 1917, not the searingly daring character actor from one of the films of last year, Femme, not the visceral raw talent seen in one of his early breakthrough roles, For Those in Peril. What’s going on?
“It’s just about the work,” he shrugs, when I ask why he’s not in the Mail’s sidebar of shame ever, “Those things are out of your control. I just want to work.”
Ah yes. What we have here is an actor. Not an Instagram influencer who’s in films. Not a preening ego or a warped meglomaniac who thinks only the big screen can possibly begin to capture their importance. Nah, MacKay is an actor, he likes to bury himself in the work, delve into the roles, deliver the character. Genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent inspiration said Edison, and here we have.
The latest expression of MacKay’s genius is typically adventurous for him. In fact it’s even adventurous for his co-star Tilda Swinton, who has never shied from going Out There. The film is called The End, it’s by Joshua Oppenheimer (who made the staggering Oscar-nominated documentaries, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence) and is about a family and a few others who lived underground in a salt mine in the aftermath of a global climate apocalypse. And it’s a musical.
MacKay says, “Ostensibly its the story of the last family on Earth living in a luxury bunker 25 years after the world's collapse, but it is a film about how a family uses denial to stay together, and the ramifications of that.”
MacKay plays Boy, who is the son of Swinton’s Mother and Michael Shannon’s Father. They live in the bunker with a handful of others, and all that time alone together has left them a bit messed up. Particularly since Father used to be an oil baron and may have had a role in that little ol’ Apocalypse. Boy is the intriguing character at the centre who has never seen daylight.
“The only social interactions he's had and relationships are all that of with those members of the of the bunker, which is his mother, his father, friend [Bronagh Gallagher], butler [Tim McInnerny], and Doctor [Lennie James]. So he has a very finite understanding of, of the world and is very particularly socialised.
“And then, there is a change to his world that then sparks a lot of questioning in his outlook.”
Indeed, the unexpected arrival of a Girl to the bunker kicks off the drama. Boy goes from someone with a few eccentric pastimes - playing with guns, singing and dancing through the salt mine, building a model that amalgamates American history into one diorama, writing a book about his dad that massages the old man’s history - who then starts to realise that maybe his environment isn’t quite right.
Of course, plenty of this is told through song.
“I've done two musical films before where the music was, I think it's fair to say, less complicated than this,” says MacKay, the other musicals being Sunshine on Leith and Hunky Dory, “This was a very particular score by the brilliant Josh Schmidt and being a musical was always just the nature of it. Josh the director has said the genre was baked into the conception of the idea, because it is a film about delusion. And for him, musicals are delusional or about delusion indirectly.
“In a sense you're always in service of whatever story he wants to tell and the requirements of that, so there was a very pragmatic approach of, it's a musical, let's dig in.”
MacKay has a soft spot from big theatrical performances, particularly John Leguizamo as Tybalt in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, and this certainly is that, but in its own particular way. Boy is gauche, playful, odd. He goofs about, farts as he dances, wheels his arms around like crazy when alone, almost like he’s exploring his humanity in the absence of other humans, other than his elders.
MacKay based some of his moves on the work of Nijinsky, the legendary dancer who caused riots with his revolutionary dancing style before he fell into mental ill health.
“There's that Nijinsky dance where he does it ‘flat’ [based on Egyptian hieroglyphics] and I was like, well Boy sees everything in two dimensions. All he's looked at are pictures and books, so he has a figurative and literal two dimensional understanding of the world.
“And then thinking about American masculinity he’d learned, like the Marlboro man, cowboys. It blossomed into a conceptual understanding of him and playing around with that.
“He was also completely unsocialised and doesn’t know that windmilling your arms isn't something one does to let off steam because it's a bit weird.”
And this is where MacKay is very much coming from, adding depth to his roles, interrogating the material, applying intellect. You can see he was a good match for Oppenheimer.
“Josh is incredibly smart and had this explanation as to why this had to be a musical. He spoke of it like a proverb, of there being three tears. as in crying tears.
“The first tear being when you see something sad, being moved by it, and the second tear being you looking at yourself seeing something sad and your sympathy for yourself, and then the third tear being the tragedy of you being sympathetic to something that is genuinely sad but have therefore removed yourself from the sadness of the situation.
“It was like, fuck OK, this man really knows his subject.”
The world’s first intellectual musical? Well, the very best have always had some of this, read Salman Rushdie’s famous essay on The Wizard of Oz for evidence of that. But The End isn’t a thesis, it is visually spectacular (the cinematographer is Mikhail ‘Leviathan’ Krichman) and it’s very funny. The actors are clearly having a ball. Was that actual salt MacKay was dancing in?
“I can't tell you the chafing man, that salt burns,” he says.
For that was an actual salt mine in Sicily, which looks exactly as it does in film, a landscape of salt, like an underground Dune.
“It's basically a prehistoric sea that's dried up, “ he says, “We drove into the side of a big hill and inside that hill is just salt. It was amazing.
“We were thinking about the project for a long time and when we were in Ireland [shooting the bunker sections], we were intellectualising it a bit and a bit judgmental about the Son. He hasn't seen the world, he hasn't got to do all these things, but there was a a lightbulb moment when we actually got there.
“Like, wow he does have an extraordinary world. He hasn't been to shops, he hasn't seen forests, he hasn't seen the sun, but there is an incredible nature in his setting. That really informs the wonder of the character because it is pretty awe-inspiring.”
Equally awe-inspiring were Swinton and Shannon, which MacKay says made things straightforward since his character’s world is literally ruled by those two. “There was a meta element to the alchemy of the cast, like it’s easy to revere Michael.”
Look, The End is an unusual film. Wicked it is not. It requires a leap of faith into this strange world but oddly for such a long film, it leaves you with a desire to watch it all over again. The layers to it, the details, the performances, it gets under your skin. And perhaps this is also because of the lessons it carries. Not simply in its climate message either.
MacKay thinks there’s a whole other layer going on too, about human behaviour.
“The film is about sort of really empathizing with these people,” he says, “It's too easy to go, they're wrong, I would never do that. But potentially, if everyone's dealt those cards, if your world becomes smaller it becomes about what is best for your family. The core of this film is that beyond the bigger things about climate change, it's about how we get to that situation, how we get to those extreme places, how we get to 25 years of living in a bunker underground when the world's collapsed. There were choices that led to that moment. How and why did those people get there?”
I ask how it relates to the current age, where people create their own realities, which may have nothing to do with the truth, and which, if you’re an authority figure, can go unquestioned by people around them. Trump being the obvious example,
“It's interesting and frightening to see now how that tries to control the whole media,” he says, “Even like the fucking the simplicity of it, he's got a social media network that's called Truth. The audacity of just saying it was said on truth and therefore it is true, that simplicity of it is disastrous.
At the minute things are so polarised, that it's very worthwhile to have a conversation in that massive chasm that is the middle. You can say, well I don’t agree with you, I don't support that, but let's have a look at how that got there.
The polarising politics and extreme situations that we get into I think are seeded in micro denials. It’s uncomfortable to admit things done with the best intentions are often done for different reasons. We can wag our finger at these terrible people but to do battle with that, I think there also has to be an acknowledgement in our own complicity with that. And this is what this film's about. The Father is an oil baron, not the best man. But at the end of the day, he's tried to look after his own.”
The End is in UK and Ireland cinemas on 28th March
