As Jacqueline McKenzie and I chase the setting sun around the foreshore of Sydney’s Blackwattle Bay I ask her why this particular harbour inlet is so special to her – and for the next 30 or so minutes the conversation follows her stream of consciousness.
It starts with a love of gardening awakened unexpectedly during the final weeks of palliative care for her beloved late cairn terrier Hershal (“my beautiful canine partner of 16-and-a-half years”), and takes a circuitous, improbable route through the blight of meth addiction in Vancouver (where she lived in the mid-2000s while filming sci-fi series The 4400), her theatre training at Nida, and kayaking with the Irish actor Fiona Shaw (at the time, the partner of McKenzie’s Deep Blue Sea co-star and friend Saffron Burrows).
It may be the coffee she is drinking bravely at 3.30pm (“I might regret this at 2am,” she admits); it may be the way her brain works. Stories segue; anecdotes are vivid and acted out with accents. “I can’t really sit still,” she tells me early in the conversation. She breaks off mid-flow at various points to comment on a favourite plant (complete with botanical name) or say hello to a passing pup (“I’m not stopping because otherwise we’ll never get anywhere,” she promises – twice). At one point she pauses to block the sun out of my eyes as she marvels at the view of the bay: “Isn’t this amazing? I love this.” She is curious, observant, somewhat distractible – and frequently delighted. There’s lots of laughter.
McKenzie’s affinity with Australian plant life dates back to growing up in a leafy Sydney suburb between Hunters Hill and Gladesville, where the family’s ramshackle house backed on to bush; her connection to the harbour was spawned during daily ferry trips to and from school. Returning to Sydney from Los Angeles during lockdown, she fell in love with the foreshore of Blackwattle Bay and Glebe – which combines both harbour and urban bushland – during walks with a group of mums from her daughter’s high school.
“At the end of term we sometimes bring the kids down and climb the trees,” she says.
Although McKenzie is now based between LA and Sydney, a string of antipodean projects have made her somewhat of a local fixture in recent years, including ABC TV series Savage River and Significant Others, and the film Force of Nature: The Dry 2, in which she played the detective partner of Eric Bana’s Aaron Falk. She just finished shooting Binge series Mix Tape (alongside Teresa Palmer), but audiences can currently see her on screen in Lee Tamahori’s blood-soaked Aotearoa New Zealand-set period drama The Convert, which opened in cinemas this week.
When we finally get to talking about the film, McKenzie’s eyes widen: this was a “bucket list” project.
“Sometimes in interviews I’m asked if I want to work with so and so, or who do I want to work with, and my answer has always been, ‘Truly, I don’t know’ – because they might not be very nice; they might not be very communicative, or they might be tyrannical on a set. But Lee Tamahori was someone who, whatever he was going to be like, I didn’t care – I just wanted to work with him.”
When Tamahori’s raw, devastating breakthrough film Once Were Warriors came out in 1994, McKenzie – at that time riding a wave of acclaim for her film debut in Romper Stomper, opposite Russell Crowe – went alone to watch it in a cinema in Melbourne, where she was working at the time. “It just absolutely stunned me – its honesty,” she recalls. “I really recognised humanity in that film.”
She describes a similar sensation watching – in the same cinema, a decade later – John Hillcoat and Nick Cave’s dark Australian western The Proposition, starring Guy Pearce (her screen partner in The Convert). “With both those movies, I just remember going: That is where I’m from. I recognise that as my country, that’s my history: it’s brutal, it’s beautiful, it’s poetic, it’s dangerous; it’s steeped in death.”
Tamahori’s latest film revolves around a preacher called Munro (Pearce) who arrives in a British settlement in coastal 1830s Aotearoa New Zealand, whose faith and pacifism are challenged when he is drawn into tensions between the settlers and two warring Māori tribes. McKenzie plays Charlotte, a Scottish convict turned healer who has a foot in both the settler and Māori communities, and becomes a translator and de facto diplomatic aide for Munro. It’s a cracker role and a fascinating character, drawing on two real-life women.
“I love research; I love learning all about [the historical context], so that when I get there [on set], I feel like I’m surrounded by the character,” says McKenzie. “The more research you do, and the more you know about what the story is about, and the more the film-makers let you in on that secret – the safer you are, because you’re all in the same boat.”
It’s not always the case, she says: “Often you are on a film set, and it is a secret [what the story is about]. A lot of people don’t know what they’re doing, and it’s often led by chaos. It may be great actors that you’re working with, but the director is chaotic, or you’re in different films somehow. Or, you know, maybe the director and the producers are amazing, but the actors aren’t, or the story’s not great. It’s really, really rare that everything lines up.”
The Convert was an exception: “I don’t know that it’s ever lined up to that degree for me,” McKenzie says. She describes Tamahori as a jack of all trades whose experience in a variety of on-set roles makes him a humble and respectful director, and Pearce as a creative whiz who “operates on set like he’s a fish in water”.
The producer Te Kohe Tuhaka, meanwhile, set the daily tone on set with all-in morning sessions in Te Reo (Māori language) that enabled every one of the local cast and crew members to “be in their power”.
McKenzie reserves perhaps her biggest rave for the film’s art department, praising the meticulous research and labour with which they created the settlement and Māori villages from scratch, on location.
Walking through the dunes and into the set for The Convert for the first time felt like the completion of a “Fibonacci sequence”, McKenzie says. “[It’s like] you don’t have to act.”
She didn’t take on another project for a year after shooting The Convert: “I was like, ‘I just have to just live with this for a moment and hold on’,” she says. “And it’s still with me. It was really incredible.
“I can’t wait for people to see it – I really can’t. I wrote to some friends this morning and said: You’ve got to see this movie. You know, we [actors] often post on the socials, but it’s not often I tell my friends.”
The Convert is screening in Australia now
