Jack Toye sat down to interview rising star George Mackay (SUNSHINE ON LEITH, PRIDE) about his career and latest project BYPASS.
Jack: Hi George, it’s a few weeks after the London Film Festival has taken place. Your new film BYPASS had its UK premiere there in Leicester Square. How was the premiere for you? Did you have a good LFF?
George: It was great thank you. It was all a bit of a whirlwind. I was working on something else at the time, so I unfortunately didn’t get to see a huge amount at the festival – I say a huge amount, I got to see BYPASS. But it was lovely to know that there was all this energy and all these films going on at the same time. The premiere itself was really cool! It’s always strange because it was such an involving experience; it’s really quite interesting to hear Duane talking in the Q&A afterwards about the film.
You always knew your path in life, and that structure, with the working men’s clubs and everything, that gave you a solid identity.
Jack: Could you offer your thoughts on the film’s title? Your character, Tim, runs across what I assume is a bypass at one point. He also has this undisclosed illness, and maybe there’s an operation there which might involve a bypass. Is the title an abstract one or a concrete one?
George: Ha! A literal concrete bypass one or a medical one… I think to be honest, I wouldn’t want to say anything that isn’t quite Duane’s interpretation of it. I never actually asked him about it. My interpretation of it is that there is the literal sense of the bypass that runs through the town, and I think that that literal image in itself is a metaphor for the generation that is being portrayed in the film. They stem from generations before them that had an industry which gave everyone a structure. People can identify themselves in that structure.
Duane was saying how in a factory town you would finish school on a Friday and start work there on a Monday. You always knew your path in life, and that structure, with the working men’s clubs and everything, that gave you a solid identity. Now, with that lack of industry, with the industry being shut down, that generation has been missed out. I think that’s what the bypass is about. Generations gone by that built something and that has bypassed this generation.
Jack: That answer leads perfectly into the next question. The Torino Film Lab’s “Script & Intention” for the film, which is where I believe Duane plugged the idea for the film, states: “Political parties no longer exist for the expression of principles. Their only values are market values. The idea of redistribution of wealth no longer has a credible representative. The working classes have been replaced by a debt-ridded, over-worked middle class, or left to evolve into a dispossessed, alienated underclass […] Tim is a young adult of this English underclass.” That’s quite a statement of intent about this character that the film centres around. What drew you to the role of Tim?
George: I think, there’s obviously the selfish element of getting to work with someone like Duane. At the same time as reading the script, which I loved, I watched BETTER THINGS, Duane’s first film. I thought it was sold so beautifully. It had a vision, an aesthetic, and a way of telling the story that was amazing. His use of sound was amazing. The pacing too. Everything about it was special and therefore that also affected the way I read BYPASS.
There were a couple of times Duane would make notes in the stage direction that would give suggestions as to how the sound design might end up. One of the first scenes between Tim and Lily when they’re going around under the bridges after he’s picked her up from work at the bookies, that in the script said “this interaction will be shot with a series of close-ups and subtle sound design to give a sense of where they are”, but it’s not meant to be quite in synch. Having seen BETTER THINGS and knowing the pacing of the way he works, it helped me imagine it all the more. Within that, Tim was a part I felt I connected to on some level, but there were also elements of him that I didn’t know a huge amount about and thought that would be a challenge in playing him.
Jack: I saw Duane hasn’t just been making this film. His name crops up in the production credits for Mark Cousins’ new film 6 DESIRES: D.H.LAWRENCE AND SARDINIA. Does he have a big team that he works with on lots of different things?
George: He works very closely with Samm Haillay, who produced BYPASS and BETTER THINGS, as well as upcoming film BLOOD CELLS, which was at Venice Film Festival as well. Third Films is his production company. The type of films he wants to work with and champion is so admirable, working with young filmmakers, getting behind them and working with them… Him and Duane often work together, and so Sam was involved in producing the Mark Cousins films too. That’s the link.
Jack: The roles you choose to take on are really rather interesting. We’ve seen you grow up through PETER PAN, DEFIANCE and PRIVATE PEACEFUL, into this mesmerising young British actor in FOR THOSE IN PERIL, SUNSHINE ON LEITH and most recently PRIDE. Could you discuss a bit about which roles you choose to take on? Are you working your way through a director’s bucket list, or do you have an incredibly good agent?
When you’re a kid you have different prerogatives and you’re not thinking about what you want to do for the rest of your life.
George: Ha! I think I’m very lucky with the agent I have. She’s truly wonderful and as much a best mate as anything. I think the people in the industry I admire, and in life in general, like the footballers who can play all over the pitch, are those that can do a number of different things and take on different roles. That’s something I want to experience, so I make an effort to.
By the same token, there aren’t piles of scripts coming in which I am just picking and choosing from. I have to audition for every role I want to get. Within that world, I want to make choices and I really respect people who make strong choices and stick to them. It’s all about making choices and within that, those are the characters that really interest me. I’m learning more and more about acting and life in general, getting older. Humans are so intricate and there is so much that you might not know about a person until you get to know them… With characters, you get to know them as you go. If there’s more to know, it’s more exciting and there’s more work for you to do.
Jack: One of the nice things I’ve found about getting older, I’m 27 now, is going out on a cycle-ride and these weird anomalies happen with your knees. You go out on a nice long cycle-ride and all of a sudden your knees start to give up. You think “heck I’m not in my 60’s here! What’s going on?!”
George: Ha yeah it’s weird with the whole aging thing, there’s so much more that comes with getting older that’s really exciting. I always remember looking at mid-20s to 45 as being “you don’t change in that time.” It’s only now that I realise you do a lot of changing every day. I think I thought it went teenage, to young adult, to middle aged, and there was a hiatus in-between where the 30s don’t happen. But apparently they do.
Jack: Yes that’s the word on the street.
George: Yes, life does go on!
Jack: We have lots of students that read TakeOne, being a Cambridge-based publication. What advice can you give to young people looking to get a foothold in the British Film Industry?
George: I want to be careful answering this as I’ve been so lucky and I don’t want to be patronising, because I’ve had so much luck falling into all this when I was younger, and then having the time to work at it. When you’re a kid you have different prerogatives and you’re not thinking about what you want to do for the rest of your life.
Jack: It’s all about Pogs and Tazos at that stage.
George: Ha yeah, it’s just all about shinies at that stage. I think the main thing now is to just work at it. If you love it, keep working at it all the time. I watched an interview with a director called Destiny Ekaragha the other day, who I got to meet. Her answer to a similar question was brilliant. She said just keep going, if you want to be a producer, do running in a production office. If you want to be a director, do running on set. Work out the industry from every different angle that you can, and keep going at it. I think that would be my main message. If you keep at it all the time, you can’t help but make connections, and things will snowball when you meet people and get inspired by people. Even if it’s just a case of putting yourself in a room where you can meet different people, then you’ll work out different ways of doing things by just being around them. The short answer would be to try as much as possible, to put yourself in situations where you can learn.
Jack: Thank you so much for filming your introduction to PRIDE for the Cambridge Film Festival this year.
George: I hope that was alright.
Jack: It was fantastic! Are you personally pleased with how well the film’s been received? It’s only just finished playing in Cambridge after something like a 7-week run.
George: Oh brilliant! I’m over the moon. It’s such a wonderful story. It’s something that people should know about. Humanity, solidarity, companionship and being together as humans is really important. The fact that it’s been well received and had a long run at the cinemas is really exciting because that’s where these films should be seen. Hopefully it will last on repeats on TV and on DVD. It’s the sort of film you’ll sit down and watch with your family.
it stems from the amazing work that LGSM did, and for that to be distilled into such a wonderful script by Stephen
Jack: I think I heard Matthew Warchus on BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme saying he wasn’t nervous about the opening weekend of the film, it was the second weekend he was hopeful for, to see if the film had legs, if it became a word of mouth film. For the film to be playing at the Arts Picturehouse for 7 weeks, it’s just done amazingly well!
George: Yes and it stems from the amazing work that LGSM did, and for that to be distilled into such a wonderful script by Stephen, and to have Matthew to orchestrate that, it’s really wonderful. I feel really lucky with how it all came together.
Jack: So my round-up question. What’s next after BYPASS for you George?
George: I just finished filming a few months ago a film called CAPTAIN FANTASTIC. It’s directed by Matt Ross, his second feature, an American indie film. It’s got Viggo Mortensen as the lead. It’s the story of a family that, because of the Dad’s political and social beliefs have been raised off the grid and trained them himself. They’re these super intelligent, super fit children who live this life out in the forest. But they are, at the same time as being extraordinary in many ways, completely un-socialised. It’s their journey down the Pacific Northwest spine of America that is the framework for the story. It’s a really wonderful script from Matt. It challenges certain political ideals, and again asks social questions under extraordinary circumstances. We had a lot of fun making it. It should be out next year I think. It’ll probably be taken to festivals first.
We finished that two months ago and I’ve just finished filming a two-part drama for the BBC called THE OUTCAST, based on the Sadie Jones book. It’ll be two hour-and-a-half episodes set in the stockbroker’s belt in Surrey in the 1950s. It’s about a repressed post-war culture in Britain, and how everything is on the surface fine, but underneath, there is a much darker underbelly to that upper-middle class and that time in and around London. It’s about a boy called Lewis, whose Mother drowned in a river when he was eight, and how that fractures the relationship between him and his father.
Jack: So there’s skulduggery afoot in Surrey? That sounds good!
George: Yeah! When you know what happens in it, that’s very good wordplay.