‘I want to keep a sense of mystery’—Thomasin McKenzie on trying hard to stay out of the spotlight

Thomasin McKenzie suddenly bursts into laughter. We’re only a few minutes into our conversation, but the sound of her mum and sister singing ‘Mamma Mia’ in another room is too much for the actor. It’s the house she has been in for three months solidly, the one in which the 21-year-old experienced the biggest moment of her career to date just weeks before.

It should have been the event that announced to the world that Thomasin McKenzie — as the star of British director Edgar Wright’s psychological thriller-meets-horror, Last Night in Soho — had most certainly arrived. But instead of standing on the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival — cameras flashing, cheeks aching, shoes pinching — McKenzie sat in her parents’ home in Wellington, New Zealand, some 11,500 miles away as the film premiered without her.

Because even as Europe opened up and everyone flew (or sailed) into Italy, McKenzie’s hometown remained in lockdown. ‘I would have really loved to be celebrating Last Night in Soho on such a grand stage,’ she says, just prior to the singing. ‘But I loved seeing the photos and the interviews. It looked like the whole team was feeling a lot of love, which made me happy.’ But did she feel sad: to sit and watch it happen without her? ‘Yeah, definitely,’ she nods. ‘The main thing for me is that I felt quite guilty to not fulfil my commitment to the film’.

Though McKenzie understandably describes watching on as ‘bittersweet’, it’s clear that being at home for an extended period — as she has been since wrapping on the BBC adaptation of the Kate Atkinson novel Life After Life in mid-July — is a rare treat for the actor. And as also becomes clear when we talk, the life she lives at home is somehow even more of a rarity.

The ‘Mamma Mia’ singing is a fairly commonplace low-key family activity. McKenzie talks about a TikTok challenge she did the night before with her brother and sister. Of her love of reading and her dog, Totoro, (the name inspired by her favourite director, Hayao Miyazaki, and his film My Neighbour Totoro). She says one of her favourite things in the world is jumping in the back seat of her parents’ car as they run errands. She smiles: ‘We sing a lot of Moana, a lot of Disney hits.’

It’s this close family and that quiet life to which McKenzie comes home after finishing each job. She is painfully aware that the next time she leaves it will be for a long while, likely until the end of next year. She thinks about how her siblings, particularly her younger sister, might change in her absence. ‘I came back and she’s grown up — she looks completely different, she’s taller than me now,’ she says of her return in the summer. ‘So, I need to take this time in before she changes again.’

It was partly the strength of family ties that turned McKenzie on to Last Night in Soho. The film opens with teenager Ellie saying goodbye to her grandmother as she prepares to leave her hometown for fashion college in London. ‘I’ve lived with my grandma my entire life,’ McKenzie says with obvious affection for the woman who also makes guest appearances on her Instagram. ‘My grandma lives downstairs, and my bedroom is right next to hers, so she’s played a huge role in my life. And so, I wanted to do this film as a tribute to her in a way.’

But that’s not the only affinity McKenzie feels with Ellie, who arrives in a bright, Technicolor London with stars firmly imprinted on her eyes. ‘Making her way to the big city with big hopes and dreams, I related to that,’ she affirms, specifically referring to life after Leave No Trace, the critically acclaimed 2018 indie film that announced McKenzie to the movie industry, if not quite the entire world. ‘I [was] similar to Ellie in arriving in a big, exciting, crazy, loud place and trying to get my bearings a little bit in the world’.

You sense that those bearings were firmly grasped during Soho’s shoot in the summer of 2019, a formative experience for the actor who was still only 19 years old. McKenzie didn’t know London well, having been once before for just two days. She describes that extended period as a ‘pretty brutal entrance’ before correcting herself: ‘Not brutal, an intense entrance. It was three weeks of night shoots — running, sprinting terrified through the Soho streets — and members of the general public looking at me like I’m a mad woman, dealing with drunk people in the middle of the night refusing to get out of the shot…’

As much as the film is a headfirst dive into the dark underbelly of Soho that’s revealed at night, the actor didn’t immerse herself in the nightlife of the city, saying she not ‘a massive pub-crawler type person’. But that doesn’t mean she entirely escaped the rough edges of the city, describing seeing ‘a man being pinned to the pavement by two big bodyguards, and he was screaming as if he was possessed’, one night while walking back to the Greek Street apartment where she was staying during rehearsals. ‘It genuinely looked like he was about to explode into the Hulk or something,’ she says with wide eyes. ‘It was really scary; that was my first experience of the London nightlife.’

Soho is just one of four McKenzie films out this year. There were three in 2019. One in 2020. This is a young woman who has grafted since working as a child actor for pocket money. She acknowledges the relentless pace of her career prior to the pandemic, speaking of ‘two solid years that were work, work, work’. And while McKenzie might speak with the thoughtfulness and maturity of a woman twice her age, she is only just out of her teens.