Thomasin McKenzie: ‘I don’t know if I’m proud to be a nepo-baby. It is what I am’

This story is part of the April 2 edition of Sunday Life.See all 14 stories.

Thomasin McKenzie’s early acting roles suggest she loves playing on the stage while dancing in the shadows, just shy of the spotlight. But small parts like Astrid in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and Pixie in New Zealand’s rite-of-passage series Shortland Street, led her to Debra Granik’s haunting Leave No Trace, which put her firmly on the map.

That performance pushed her into the pre-Oscar awards season, with nominations for the Gotham, Independent Spirit and Critics’ Choice awards, and a win from the prestigious National Board of Review for Breakthrough Performance. It also led to roles in films directed by M. Night Shyamalan and Jane Campion, and now her own television series, Totally Completely Fine.

But McKenzie, 22, is no stranger to fame. She grew up with not one but two legendary acting Dames: her mother, Dame Miranda Harcourt, and her grandmother, Dame Kate Harcourt. To translate that from New Zealand to the rest of the world, it would be not unlike having Meryl Streep for a mum and Maggie Smith for a nan.

Growing up with such role models, McKenzie says, was deeply affecting. “Thinking about it actually makes me want to cry because I’m really proud of my grandma and my mum,” she says. “The only pressure I’ve felt to live up to the success that my mum, grandma and Dad [film director Stuart McKenzie] have had, was external.

“Within the family, I’ve never felt any pressure to become an actor; they all forged their own paths and were accepting of whatever I wanted to do. [But] a family of overachievers really set the bar for me, and I think I’m always trying to keep up with that.”

Such a theatrical bloodline also opens up the thorny question of being a “nepo-baby”, the name coined in a New York Magazine story last year which refers to Hollywood stars and their in-the-spotlight offspring. The narrative, which was to some extent negative, was flipped by actor Jamie Lee Curtis this year, who proudly name-checked her famous parents, screen legends Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, when she won her Screen Actors Guild award in February.

“I’ve always been aware of how lucky I am that I was born into a family that is established in the film and theatre industry, at least within New Zealand,” McKenzie says. “Both of my parents have been instrumental in my success.”

It would be insulting to them, she adds, to deny the connection. “I’ve seen how much they’ve sacrificed to support me,” she says. “I don’t know if I’m proud to be a nepo-baby, but I’m not not proud of it, if that makes sense. It is what I am, and I’m not going to deny that. But I also don’t want that to diminish how hard I’ve seen my parents work and how hard I know I have worked.”

“I don’t want that to diminish how hard I’ve seen my parents work and how hard I know I have worked.”

Totally Completely Fine, which Stan (owned by Nine, publisher of this masthead) is producing with AMC Networks’ Sundance Now and Fremantle, is the story of 20-something Vivian Cunningham whose life, already something of a train wreck, is upended when her grandfather passes away and leaves her his sprawling old home. Vivian is in the house barely a day when she realises it overlooks a cliff that frequently draws the suicidal, and through various encounters, discovers that her father had spent his later years here, lending an ear to the troubled souls drawn to the drop and saving them from themselves.

Despite being just 22, McKenzie has worked with a number of prominent filmmakers.Credit: Rosaline Shahnavaz/AUGUST

The show’s creator, Gretel Vella (The Great, A Sunburnt Christmas), has described the series as a “response to the mental health crisis, written for myself and so many other people in my life to let them know they aren’t alone, that mess is okay, and sometimes the pain and anxieties we try and hide can be our greatest superpowers”.

The series is described as “inspired by true events” because it taps into the story of Sydney man Don Ritchie, dubbed “the angel of The Gap”, who spent more than five decades talking hundreds of people out of taking their own lives at the nearby cliffs. Hailed a hero, Ritchie died in 2012, aged 85.

McKenzie says she learnt all she could about Ritchie after she read the scripts for the series. “I researched his story and who he was,” she says. “He was an incredible person who affected so many lives. [The series] takes that and then builds on it.”

In Totally Completely Fine’s marketing material, it states that “Maybe, in saving these people, Viv will slowly start to save herself.” But it’s a little too neat to say that Totally Completely Fine is the story of an angel getting her wings.

“That sounds too clean and tidy,” says McKenzie. “I think Vivian is a lot messier than that. Maybe by the end of the first season she sees the potential and the impact she could have, so it’s a beginning. But she’s not in any way fully healed.”

What is so striking about McKenzie is that, despite being just 22, she has accumulated a body of work that has connected her to a number of prominent filmmakers. She has worked under the direction of David Michôd (The King), Liz Garbus (Lost Girls), M. Night Shyamalan (Old) and three Kiwi filmmakers, Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog), Peter Jackson (The Hobbit) and Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit).

“Mum experiencing a similar kind of attention when she was the same age as me is something that’s been very valuable to me.”

“That has played a massive part in shaping my career and me as a person, and my approach to work as well,” she says. “It’s quite wild. I think I owe a lot of that to my agents and manager for putting me in those rooms and working so hard on my behalf to connect me with amazing people.”

Her first significant directorial relationship, she says, was with Debra Granik, who directed her in Leave No Trace, the critically acclaimed 2018 drama based on Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment, inspired by the true story of a former soldier suffering from PTSD who lives in a remote forest with his daughter.

“Debra is an incredibly collaborative director and she made me feel empowered to have a voice,” McKenzie says. “She set the bar for me, and I was very fortunate to be treated with such respect at such a young age. I think that’s pretty rare, and it has made me realise that I’m an actor who really enjoys collaboration.”

McKenzie has set her sights on Hollywood, for sure, but she says she’s wary of the spotlight, a lesson learnt growing up in a family that garnered more attention than most. For example, in the 1980s, McKenzie’s mother played journalist Gemma Stace in the high-camp, legendary Kiwi soap opera Gloss – New Zealand’s answer to Dynasty and Dallas.

“It’s really important to have a couple of things that fuel your soul, because it’s pretty dangerous to define yourself by one single thing.”

“I wasn’t alive when Mum was filming Gloss [but] it’s something that people often bring up,” McKenzie says. “I’m very, very proud of that. Mum experiencing a similar kind of attention when she was the same age as me is something that’s been very valuable to me because she understands what I’m going through.”

But the spotlight is, she observes, “a dangerous thing, isn’t it? Even if it’s slight, that extra layer of the feeling of being watched can make someone very egotistical or narcissistic or self-centred. I don’t like the idea of having my life just ripped apart and analysed. I don’t like the idea of being the centre of attention. I never have.

“One of my worst nightmares is being overdressed and drawing attention to myself,” McKenzie adds. “That makes me feel so uncomfortable. As an actor, I’ve always felt much more comfortable observing. I think the reason I went into acting in the first place is because it’s where I felt most at home. [But] the desire to act wasn’t born out of the desire to be famous.”

And if it doesn’t work out? She can always give it all up and become a vet, a career she’s on the record as saying she came close to pursuing. “When I was younger, I literally wanted to be anything but an actor,” McKenzie says. “I was dead set against it; I wanted to be a vet or a zookeeper or anything to do with animals.”

Even now, she says, she’s studying at university (majoring in history and minoring in classics) because she wants to “experiment with what else is out there, and what else I might be passionate about”.

“It’s really important to have a couple of things that fuel your soul, because it’s pretty dangerous to define yourself by one single thing, especially since my passion is acting, but my career is also acting,” McKenzie says.

“That can be a little bit tricky because if I’m succeeding or I’m failing at acting, that’s succeeding or failing in life. I want something else that I’m able to balance it out with.”

Totally Completely Fine streams on Stan from April 20.

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