IN some ways things are getting darker in George MacKay’s world . Whereas in the past he has often played decent, soft-spoken young men in films like Pride and Sunshine on Leith, of late he has been turning up as a cross-dressing infamous Aussie outlaw in True History of the Kelly Gang, a shell-shocked soldier in 2017 and a closeted thug in Femme. And now, in French auteur Bertrand Bonello’s epic, beautiful and at times baleful new French film The Beast, MacKay plays an incel with murderous intentions, a character based on a real-life killer.
How dark do you want it? In other ways, though, life has lightened. Good ways. MacKay and his Scottish wife, the make-up artist Doone Forsyth, now have two young children, after all, and MacKay is learning how to be a dad.
Is there a connection in all this? Actually, there is. Because fatherhood has made him begin to ask a lot of questions of himself and of society; questions about masculinity in particular. Hence his career choices of late.
“I wouldn’t say my masculinity is in crisis, but I’ve become very responsible in my life,” MacKay suggests as he sits in a nondescript office in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, cheekbones razor-sharp, accent as precise as only an English public school education can polish (in his case The Harrodian School in London). “And I think currently, socially,” he continues, “the values of established masculinity are being completely re-evaluated. “This theme of masculinity seems really pert.
