Mackenzie Davis: ‘I’m aware of social embarrassment. But most things that feel high stakes are actually low stakes’

“I’m quite delusional,” says Mackenzie Davis. “One of my best friends, Sarah Goldberg, is an actress. I’ve known her since I was three. I remember her dad was talking to us after some play that one of us had been in. And he said, ‘God, did you girls ever think that you’d be here, acting in TV, being on Broadway?’ We were both, like, ‘Yeah. Yeah. We did!’”
Davis, a relaxed Canadian with a buzzy sense of humour, says this with no hint of arrogance. If anything, she’s aghast at her earlier confidence. And she has, indeed, done very well for herself. She has been at the front of high-end TV shows such as Station Eleven, and Halt and Catch Fire. She was a lead in San Junipero, everyone’s favourite episode of Black Mirror. She was eerie and unreal as the title character in Jason Reitman’s Tully. She got to sweat alongside Schwarzenegger as the female lead in Terminator: Dark Fate. This month she is terrific opposite James McAvoy in James Watkins’s fine remake of the Danish horror Speak No Evil.
Before we get to that, she spends some time admiring my house (Zoomily visible behind me). “It’s so cute,” she says. “I shot in Ireland a few years ago. And I was staying in a little fisherman’s house in Dalkey. It was one room and a fireplace. It was so nice. I loved it so much.”
Oh, that’s right. She was in a contemporary remake of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw called The Turning. It was one of those disconcerting projects in which Ireland played the United States.
“We were in Bray and in Sandycove,” she says. “I was going swimming in Dalkey all the time. I love Ireland so much. I think it’s one of the greatest countries I’ve ever been to.”
Good job, Mackenzie. That’s how you work an interview.
I suppose, growing up near Vancouver, she had her fill of opportunities to swim in refreshingly icy water. There is no Gulf Stream up there.
“I didn’t do it until I went to Ireland,” she says. “I was in Scotland this year shooting in the very, very north. I was swimming there. But I got into it in Ireland. I credit you guys for your mettle and your industrial strength!”
We’ll get back to her Canadian origins after pondering her excellent work in Speak No Evil. It is common to roll eyes when we hear of an English-language remake of a European film, but Watkins’s piece is a worthy variation on the Danish original.
In this version, a British couple (James McAvoy and our own Aisling Franciosi) meet an American pair (Davis and Scoot McNairy) while holidaying by the Med and, despite distinct differences in temperament, agree to meet up at the Brits’ home in the West Country some months later. The Americans soon become unnerved by their hosts’ intrusive informality and occasionally plain abusive behaviour.
It is no spoiler to relate that it ends in violence, but the preceding social embarrassment is considerably more excruciating. The first hour is one long squirm.
“That’s my favourite thing about the movie,” says Davis. “It feels like it places all that on the same plane as the violence. By the time the violence comes, you think, I needed some murder to cleanse my palate from all of these social faux pas.”
The film appears to set humanity in two camps. Davis and McNairy represent those pathologically embarrassed at social eccentricity. Franciosi and McAvoy are of the shameless school, the type who use their informality as a stick to bully the inhibited. “Ah, relax! Don’t be so uptight!” That sort.
“I’m probably somewhere in the middle,” says Davis. “I’m aware of social embarrassment. But my philosophy in life is that most things that feel high stakes are actually low stakes. If you can just convince yourself that those faux pas can be spoken through, then you will diffuse the energy. I attack things I have anxiety about by thinking: This is actually low stakes.”
What does she make of transferring Christian Tafdrup’s original to England? In the earlier film the hosts were Dutch and the guests were Danish. Here the drama plays with a particular sort of American inhibition – unease at unconventionality – that people from that country don’t always recognise in themselves.
“Of course it’s going to be different with a Danish couple and a Dutch couple who have their own social contracts and impressions of each other,” says Davis. “I can say, having moved to England in the last four years, that, for North Americans, there isn’t a lot of differentiation. Particularly considering what a class-conscious country it is, with different levels of class and schooling. We are just charmed by it all.”
Even now? Does that still happen when an American or Canadian person visits England?
“It’s, like, ‘I’m in a movie of my life, and you are all the characters in my life.’ So there’s this allowance for some of the things you might be more sensitive about at home. Because you’re, like, ‘Oh, well, that’s just the English.’”
I am interested to hear her say that. It is hard for us to parse the difference between the US and Canada in their relationship to the United Kingdom, and England in particular. Canada resembles the United States in so many ways. But they have HP Sauce on the cafe tables. Davis was born and raised in Vancouver to well-off parents in the haircare business. She attended the distinguished McGill University in Montreal and studied acting in New York. So she is qualified to speak about the issue.
“Canada is palpably part of the Commonwealth,” says Davis. “We have the queen – or, I guess, the king now – on our money. There is a little bit of British cosplay that goes on in Canada. Is Victoria the capital of BC? It’s certainly on Vancouver Island.”
I checked. Victoria is the capital of British Columbia.
“There’s a reproduction of Anne Hathaway’s house – Shakespeare’s wife. And there’s the Empress hotel. And you go there for high tea. Um, I’m not answering your question at all. But there is a Britishness in Canada that’s really there. And it is different from America. There’s quite a distinction between us. I feel closer to an English sort of vibe, because of how I grew up, rather than American.”
But Canadians surely don’t have the same experience we have when we first go to the United States. It is, for us, like going to the place where telly happens. All these social conventions we knew about but hadn’t experienced in three dimensions.
“I had the same experience when I first went to LA and California,” she says. “‘Oh, the background to Looney Tunes is this land.’ It’s not made up. It actually just comes from the desert out there – and Baywatch is real. It’s quite shocking to the system. Because it just feels imaginary.”
By the second decade of the century, Davis had gained a foothold in the business. From 2014 to 2017, she enjoyed a lead role in Halt and Catch Fire, a series about the early days of the PC revolution that gained raves but modest viewership. Roles in The Martian and Blade Runner 2049 came while that was still on air. Then a huge part in a huge Terminator flick. She has the looks for lead roles but also has a quirkiness that makes her stand out in any exchange. It feels as if she was never in danger of slipping back into an everyday job. It helps, of course, if you have supportive parents.
“They were cool. They’re cool for letting me do it,” she says. “They paid for me to go to theatre school. That’s so insane. That’s so nice.”
Plays and movies were always going to come. But she is admirably frank about the advantages she has had. There is no poor mouth here.
“My parents supported me through theatre school, paid my rent for those two years and never asked for money back,” she says. “Which is one of those generational-wealth things that you just can’t quantify. You’re so lucky if you have that on your side. But as soon as I could, I cut myself off – and it felt great.”
Davis happily admits that just getting to do the job was more important than any of the glamour that followed.
“Yeah, that felt bigger to me than anything that came after.”
Speak No Evil is in cinemas from Thursday, September 12th