Emma Mackey: A little bit of sass

Sex Education star Emma Mackey was unknown in her native France when she was cast in the sumptuous Eiffel.

Emma Mackey in of Sex Education.

When Emma Mackey was cast in Sex Education she was virtually unknown. Like Rege-Jean Page in that other sexually explicit British Netflix series Bridgerton, Mackey emerged as the breakout star for her role as the punk with the heavy eyeliner, Maeve Wiley. Who was to know that Mackey was born and raised in France?

Kenneth Branagh was well aware when he cast the bilingual actor, the daughter of a French father and British mother, as Jacqueline de Bellefort in the long-delayed all-star would-be Disney behemoth Death on the Nile, the sequel to 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express. French director Martin Bourboulon, following the advice of his producer who had watched Sex Education with her kids, cast Mackey in her first French-language role alongside French star Romain Duris in Eiffel, the biggest French production of 2020, which opened this year’s Australian French Film Festival.

She has since been cast in her first leading role as Emily Bronte in the upcoming Emily, the directing (and writing) debut of Australian actor Frances O’Connor and co-produced by Robert Connelly (The Dry),

It’s all been a whirlwind, Mackey says, though the level-headed 25-year-old has taken all the attention in her stride. She explains over Zoom how she moved to Britain at 17 to study at Leeds University and relocated to London three years later to pursue ­acting.

She says she did not expect to be cast when she auditioned for Sex Education – a high school comedy, (but not as you know it) which stars Asa Butterfield as sexually neurotic teen Otis and Gillian Anderson as his mother, Jean – as she was concerned she might not look young enough. She also thought Netflix would want an actor with more of a profile.

“It took the pressure off, and I was like, I’m never going to get it. So I just went to the audition deciding I was going to have fun.”

Her natural acting style prevailed and once cast she discovered the series was full of surprises. “The characters are not at all what you expect them to be,” she says. “It’s really cool to kind of subvert all of those classic tropes that we often see in high school dramas.”

Following the series’ success she was keen to return to France to appear in Eiffel even if the second season of Sex Education was shooting at the same time.

“It was definitely a feat of organisation; I felt like I was living two different lives at once,” she recalls. “But that’s the best-case scenario when you can play different parts. So I was playing Maeve in the week and then Adrienne at weekends, and that was my life for a couple of months – and it was great, it was a good mental ­exercise.”

Vivacious and open Mackey possesses a fresh-faced, wide-eyed beauty and is a natural in front of the camera, whether as the sassy Maeve in Sex Education or as Adrienne Bourges, the love of Gustave Eiffel’s life. “Obviously Eiffel is a costume drama, but it’s modern, you know, it’s not rigid, it felt quite free. I think Adrienne has a little bit of sass.”

Part of that freedom stemmed from how little is known of the real Adrienne, especially in her later years. She came from an upper-class Bordeaux family who, in 1858, hired Eiffel to build a railway footbridge. The pair fell in love and planned to marry, long before Eiffel had huge success building the Eiffel Tower, but her father cancelled the marriage as Eiffel was way below her social standing. In the film, they meet 20 years later and realise what they have missed.

“There was very little to go on, there’s nothing about her personality, which was lovely to me, because I got to start from scratch,” Mackey says. “When we first meet Adrienne she’s a married woman and she’s slightly older and she’s more reserved. But she starts to reconnect with Gustave and then we see the 18-year-old wide-eyed girl that she once was, when she was more playful and curious.”

Rather fancifully, the film posits that after Eiffel had initially only been interested in building the underground Paris Metro, his sudden passion for constructing the wrought-iron monument must have been because of his renewed love for Adrienne, even to the extent that the tower is shaped in the letter A.

Emma Mackey in the film Eiffel.

Bourboulon notes how he had been keen to cast Mackey who was well known to international audiences but was little known in her native France. “Emma had only worked in English at that point. So it was a wonderful opportunity to bring this person who is a wonderful actor, very talented, with a lot of energy and to have her embody the woman behind the Eiffel Tower.”

While making the film Mackey says she shared “a natural complicity” with Duris. “We wanted to do the story justice and it was important that we click, and we did.”

So what is love for Mackey? “You can’t really put a finger on what love is because it belongs to each individual. I think that what we show in the film is that love means staying true to oneself and being authentic and how sometimes people are made for one another and fulfil each other. Their love drives them and pushes them to do things.”

Mackey grew up in Sable-sur-Sarthe in the Loire Valley, so her relationship with the Eiffel Tower was from a distance. “As a kid I remember going there on school trips with my friends, but to this day I still haven’t been up the tower. Obviously I now see her through very different eyes and she sort of feels like a friend.”

The later scenes were filmed before Covid forced the production to shut down. The flashbacks were filmed three months later and it was helpful, says Mackey, who was “not afraid” as the required anti-Covid measures were in place.

“We had the luxury of going back with new costumes, new hair, new everything and it felt like we were stepping into new shoes. Yet it still felt familiar.”

Did making the film inspire her portrayal in Emily – also set in the 19th century – in the Yorkshire-set film that follows the uplifting story of a young misfit who went on to write Wuthering Heights.

“Emily is its own project, but I do love a costume drama. I studied English at Leeds University – I love English – so playing a Bronte was like going back to what was my first home in the UK. It’s very close to my heart.”

She stresses that Emily – like Eiffel – is not a biopic. “It’s very much Frances’s interpretation of certain biographical elements of Emily’s life and her brothers and sisters and her family but also intertwined with elements of Wuthering Heights, her only novel that she published. So it’s a very creative take on her life story.”

Mackey says she is keen to learn and was “like a sponge” when working alongside Annette Bening on Death on the Nile.

Emma Mackey and Romain Duris in Eiffel

Now as the third season of Sex Education is about to drop on Netflix we watch as there are new characters, most prominently Moordale’s new head teacher (played by Jemima Kirke from Girls), and there are new subjects to tackle and new friendships.

At the end of the second season Maeve, who lives in a trailer home with her mother and young half-sister, disclosed her mother’s renewed drug use to child services. Maeve has developed a sense of responsibility and is less the bad girl character than when the series started, even if she remains tough.

“Maeve is kind of what I was like at uni, not on the outer, but on the inside,” Mackey says. “I put up a lot of defence mechanisms, but I wasn’t mean or aggressive. Now after playing Maeve if people annoy me, I have to react. But it’s all polite.”

In France, Mackey’s sex education at high school comprised a one-hour biology class about reproduction. “I remember my science teacher talking about ovul­ation and then about erogenous zones like they’re weird. It was bizarre and I don’t think it was much different in the UK,” she says.

“I’m hoping the series is changing the way we educate people. We need to break all the taboos around sex and get everything out in the open so that no one feels embarrassed. People of my age come up to me and send me messages that the series has helped them so much. Young parents and older mums come up to me, too, and say it’s their guilty pleasure. I think it’s a breath of fresh air.”

Eiffel is in cinemas in NSW and Victoria, October 14; Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, Northern Territory and Tasmania, September 2; Hobart State, September 9.
Season three of Sex Education streams on Netflix from September 17.