Time Capsule George MacKay
THE FEMME STAR LOOKS BACK AT HIS LIFE IN PICTURES
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
HAVING JUST ENTERED his thirties, British actor George MacKay is the youngest person to undergo Empire’s Time Capsule experience. But in the two decades that he’s been working as an actor, going all the way back to 2003’s Peter Pan, he’s displayed a real taste for off-kilter, unusual, compelling projects. Not least his new film Femme, a neo-noir thriller in which he terrifies as a deeply closeted thug who embarks upon an affair with a Black drag queen (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett). See you in another 30 years for round two, George.
THE ILLUSTRATED MAN FEMME (2023)
“My character, Preston, is not a happy man. We had such help with our costumes and make-up. I needed something that made me directly identifiable, so we went for a neck tattoo. That was literally the very first one we put on. There’s a word in Latin hidden inside the skeleton bird on my throat that speaks to Preston. There’s a couple of random shit tattoos, and also a couple of more feminine things that pertain to my own mother, who used to work in the ballet. And I wrote my own poem, so even though the tattoos are really typical, big, scary tattoos, they’re imbued with a subtlety. It was really exciting because it opened the character up so much.”