Everyone in Her Family Acted.
So She Announced at Five That She Would Be Anything Else. A Zookeeper, Ideally.
Her Father Spent the Next Twenty Years Sitting Beside Her on Set Anyway.

The Thomasin McKenzie Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"I cannot relate to your success as an actor. But I can relate to your struggles as a human."

- David Begnaud to Thomasin McKenzie

Hundreds of Auditions. She Lost Roughly Ninety Percent. Her Father Never Taught Her to Win.

Thomasin McKenzie was born into a house full of performers - her mother a dame who ran New Zealand's national drama school, her grandmother a dame and one of the country's most beloved actresses, her brother the lone defector to journalism. She chose her father, Stuart, a writer, director and acting coach who studied theology at Cambridge as the person who believed in her. She has been working since she was a teenager, and more often than not he was the one on set with her.

When David asked what exactly he sacrificed, she named something less obvious than hours. "Not only was it a sacrifice of his time physically, but his time emotionally. He really dedicated a lot of his mind space, his emotional bank, to be there for me." She has spent more time with her father than most daughters get. She thinks that is what will connect them forever.

His coaching, by her account, amounted to one line, and it was never about acting. Exams, auditions, anything: enjoy the process. She says there was no pressure attached to it - no instruction to do a good job or be the smartest - and that it set her up well for life.

The test case came in Prague. She was seventeen, shooting soon-to-be Oscar-nominated film, JoJo Rabbit, riding a run of success, and she lost a role she had already seen herself in - latched onto, she says, far too strongly and far too early. She was devastated. Her father was living there with her while the rest of the family stayed in New Zealand. What she remembers is not what he said. "It wasn't that he imparted any certain piece of advice. It was the fact that he was there with me."

▶ Watch on YouTube: Why she chose her father - ~0:45

Her Film Premiered in Venice. She Was Twenty-One and Could Not Leave the House. She Had Never Said That Out Loud Until This Interview.

She prefaced it by saying she was about to reveal something: Last Night in Soho, directed by Edgar Wright, was premiering at Venice in the middle of COVID. She was supposed to go. Her anxiety was bad enough that she couldn't - couldn't leave the house at all. Her father's response is the whole reason he is the subject of this episode. He did not make her feel bad about it.

David asked her to define it, because people hear the word and don't know what it means. She was specific. She shuts down; her throat closes; she can't speak. At its height she was having panic attacks regularly, and between them she would forget how bad they got - convince herself she had been overreacting, that it wasn't a big deal - until the next one arrived and she remembered. "You even kind of gaslight yourself into thinking you're overreacting, until you're in the height of it again and you feel like you're gonna die."

What stops [a panic attack], when anything does, is physical and it usually involves another person. Her mother handing her ice to suck, putting her dog in her arms, wrapping a blanket around her. Sour candy. Her face in a bowl of ice water. Today she takes medication, has worked out which kind suits her, does breathing exercises, and tells people when she isn't okay, because sitting alone with it is what makes it isolating. On why it is so hard to explain to anyone who hasn't had anxiety, she reached for the best image in the hour: it is like trying to describe temperature. Try right now, in summer, to remember what freezing feels like. You can't quite get there.

She has wanted to quit acting - not because she stopped loving it, but because there were stretches when she did not feel capable of it. And she has built her own way out, which she demonstrated on tape without quite noticing. In the middle of a panic attack she tells herself she has got through this before and it will end. She anchors it to a line from Rilke that closes JoJo Rabbit: no feeling is final.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Venice, the panic attacks, and what actually helps - ~7:17

She Overheard Her Mother Coaching Other Girls Through an Audition. At Thirteen, She Asked If She Could Try Out.

The film was Consent, based on the story of Louise Nicholas, a New Zealand woman who was assaulted as a teenager by police officers and was not believed in court. Thomasin was listening through the wall. Then she asked her mother if she could read for it. David asked why, and her first answer was that she didn't know - and then she found the answer two years earlier.

At eleven she was shy, insecure, not a go-getter by her own description. A teacher chose her as a class leader - a role she had never pictured herself in. "It was my teacher who had faith that I would do a good job. And I think that kind of changed things for me, and I started advocating for myself." Her expectations for herself rose. Two years later she asked for the audition.

That standard has cost her things. Around 2019 she was cast in Top Gun: Maverick and walked away from it to make Lost Girls, about the families of murdered young women on Long Island, directed by Liz Garbus. The case was unsolved when they shot it. The film and Garbus's documentary brought attention to it; an arrest followed years later. She was reluctant to take any credit - "I don't want to give myself" - until David pushed her to finish the sentence. She likes the word useful for what she does. She also says she is no expert on anything, which is part of why she likes acting: it lets her amplify people who are.

The correction to all that seriousness came from two directors. Taika Waititi, after she had flown to Prague and read Anne Frank's diary to prepare for JoJo Rabbit, told her to go watch Mean Girls - so she would stop seeing her character as only a victim. And on the limited series Life After Life, John Crowley caught her giving every character's hardship all of her attention and told her: find the joy. There are joyful moments in life. They're what we live for.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The audition she asked for, at thirteen - ~28:07

In Her Own Film, the Daughter Walks Away from the Father. So David Asked Whether She Ever Felt That Pull.

Leave No Trace is the one film she'd want everyone to see - a girl living in the forest with her father, who eventually walks into the trees without him. David turned it into the last real question of the hour. She answered it against herself.

She was twenty-two. Between jobs she kept going home to live with her parents, and she realised she was relying on him too much. So she moved to London - not because he walked away, but because she needed to.

She has since moved back to Wellington. David's final question was whether she is happy with who she is, and the answer had nothing to do with the work: yes, because she knows she is a good person. She is aware that nice is treated as a lesser quality, the thing you don't want to be known for, and she has decided she is proud of it. What sticks with her after a job is not how well she did. It is whether she was kind.

She learned the measure from her grandmother. New Zealand is a small country and a smaller industry, so nearly everyone she meets has crossed paths with her - and every one of them says the same thing. Just the other day a woman told her she had done a play with her grandmother, and that during a difficult pregnancy her grandmother had lent her the car.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Walking into the forest - ~1:04:49

"I'm Thomasin McKenzie, and the person who believed in me was my dad, Stuart McKenzie."