Kelly Macdonald shines in Operation Mincemeat
Behind her sweet smile is a quiet strength, one Kelly Macdonald holds her own against alpha men in small independent films and blockbusters alike, including her latest film, Operation Mincemeat.
If Kelly Macdonald comes across as a charismatic, unassuming, straight-talking lass who brings talent and professionalism to every acting role, and someone with whom you’d like very much to be best friends, it’s probably because that’s exactly how she is.
Behind the sweetest smile is a quiet strength, and Macdonald holds her own against alpha men in blockbuster and small independent film and television projects alike.
She has never been a walkover, whether in her breakout role as Diane in the 1996 film Trainspotting, playing a character who runs with a gang of Scottish heroin addicts and has them all eating out of the palm of her hand; her devastating turn as Josh Brolin’s wife, complete with a note-perfect Texan accent, in Joel and Ethan Coen’s brutally visceral adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men; or as mistress, then wife, to Steve Buscemi’s ruthless gangster in Boardwalk Empire.
And never has the 46-year-old Scottish actor been far from success. Is it a case of the chicken or the egg? The actor or the project?
Now she’s triumphing as a troubled detective in the sixth season of British police procedural series Line of Duty and appears as herself in the first episode of Ten Percent, the British version of hit French series Call My Agent!
If that’s not enough going on at one time, she also has a supporting (yet shining) role in Operation Mincemeat as a character based on real-life MI5 secretary Jean Leslie, who had surprising input into a British ruse that changed the course of World War II. The film has garnered strong reviews, including four stars from The Australian’s David Stratton.
“Jean was a really great character to play,” Macdonald says, sitting on a Glasgow couch and talking over Zoom. “The real Jean was quite ballsy and it was her photograph that was used in the film. But they played about with the story a little bit and she was really like a lot of women who were working in that room.
“I got to play someone with strong boundaries who knew what she was about and knew how to have a good time as well, which is not always the case with the parts that I play.”
Set in 1943, Operation Mincemeat, directed by John Madden (Mrs Brown, Shakespeare in Love, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) and based on Ben Macintyre’s book, follows the true story of intelligence officers Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth) and Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen), who devise a disinformation strategy to throw the Nazis off course by making them believe Allied forces will land in Greece rather than Sicily.
The ruse involves releasing a dead body dressed in a British officer’s uniform and carrying fake documents regarding a Greek landing into the Mediterranean just off the coast of Spain. For the plan to work, Nazi spies have to find the documents, so it is a huge risk.
“I didn’t know about it,” Macdonald admits. “I’d heard the title of the 1956 film, The Man Who Never Was, based on Montagu’s book, but I hadn’t seen it. So it was new to me. And it is extraordinary. And unbelievable. All these stories came together to win the war. It’s all a bit mind-bending.”
In the film Macdonald’s Jean works closely with the men, helping devise a backstory for the officer that includes supplying a personal photo left on the body as a suggestion of the sweetheart he’d left behind. She also has a kind of dalliance with Montagu.
Operation Mincemeat marks Macdonald’s third film with Firth after My Life So Far and Nanny McPhee. “I played his daughter to start with and then his love interest twice. I’ll be his mother next,” she quips. “I get on with Colin very well; we’re good friends. So yeah, he’s like a lifer. I don’t think we realised when we first worked together that he’s got me for life.”
So did Leslie have a full-blown relationship with Montagu? That wasn’t allowed to happen? “I think there was something going on behind the scenes, but the film didn’t want to make it implicit because he was married. But Ben Macintyre, who met Jean Leslie, would tell us wonderful stories about her. She was a very flirty women, even in her 80s or 90s when he met her.”
Macdonald enjoyed being in the 1940s setting. “I loved the costumes and the dancing and weirdly I liked the dark hair. The last time I had a dark wig for a job was to play a ghost and they didn’t have to put any makeup on me,” she says, joking, about her role as Helena Ravenclaw, The Grey Lady, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
“What was nice about playing Jean was I got to wear makeup, so actually dark hair does look OK on me … most of the jobs I do they say, ‘No makeup, be very natural.’ So Jean Leslie was pretty much as glamorous as I’ve played.”
The mother of two sons, Macdonald still looks incredibly youthful and I tell her so. “That’s very cool,” she says, chuckling. “I’m lucky. My mum’s got pretty good skin, although she’s got terrible hair. So thank goodness I got my hair from elsewhere.”
On the topic of hair, it was dyed red when she appeared alongside Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth, the film that launched the Australian star in Hollywood.
The memory of that film prompts this unstarry anecdote. “That’s a very long time ago and me and (English actor) Emily Mortimer became instant best friends and just decided that Cate Blanchett was our hero or heroine and we wanted to be like her,” she recalls.
“I suppose we were getting into character because we were both playing her ladies-in-waiting. We found out that she would go jogging in the morning, so we attempted that one morning after we’d had about three hours’ sleep. We hadn’t jogged before and we made it past two lampposts in front of the Waterside Hotel in Newcastle where we were staying. That didn’t last, but yeah Cate, she’ll always be our queen.”
Does she exercise or jog now? “You know what’s weird? I’ve done more exercise in my 40s than I’ve ever done. If I don’t do something every day I can feel it.”
Macdonald was 19 and an untrained newcomer to acting when she played 15-year-old Diane, who is besotted by Ewan McGregor’s adult Renton, in Trainspotting. In a moment that would probably struggle in today’s febrile environment, an empowered Diane threatens to report Renton to the authorities when he discovers her age and wants to break up with her.
Would such an (arguably sympathetic) portrayal of an underage girl having sex be something we’d tolerate in today’s politically correct environment?
“It’s an interesting one,” Macdonald replies. “I haven’t really questioned that, but I think it’s important that these things are thought about now. Anything that reflects real life can’t be unacceptable just because it’s unappealing. These things happen.”
She is occasionally in contact with her Scottish co-stars – they collaborated again on the 2017 sequel. “Out of the blue I’ll get an email from Ewan, but I see him rarely. But every time I see him, it’s just a joy. Ewen Bremner as well.”
I ask her about filming No Country for Old Men, which won four Academy awards including best picture and best director. Was it her favourite? “I love the Coen brothers. They’re just delightful people and very down to earth, and just really, really good at what they do. But every job is sort of my new favourite, almost. It changes all the time.”
There have been several TV detective roles in recent years – she plays a Metropolitan Police officer helping a Tokyo detective to find his brother in London in the brilliant Giri/Haji on Netflix, and had a guest role as Detective Chief Inspector Jo Davidson in Line of Duty (BritBox) for one series, following in the footsteps of Keeley Hawes and Thandiwe Newton.
“I like wearing a suit and being in charge,” Macdonald admits with a giggle. “I think audiences like watching female detectives on TV.” She credits Line of Duty writer and creator Jed Mercurio (Bodyguard) for being a master of suspense. “That’s why people keep coming back to the show. There’s a lot going on in Jo’s life, but it takes a while to find out.”
Her turn on the comically meta Ten Percent was a welcome change of pace, she says. “It was really nice to do something a bit lighthearted.”
During the first pandemic lockdown Macdonald had watched the French Call My Agent! (Dix Pour Cent) on the recommendation of Downton Abbey’s Penelope Wilton, who is also in Operation Mincemeat. “She said she thought it would be up my street so I watched it and really, really loved it,” Macdonald says.
The first episode of Ten Percent follows Macdonald being dropped from playing Bird Woman in a big Hollywood franchise because she is too old, a scenario reflecting the Call My Agent! pilot where Cecile de France had to face the news of being dropped from a Quentin Tarantino film for the same reason. A talent agent encourages Macdonald to undergo cosmetic surgery. Thankfully in real life the actor hasn’t been subjected to such treatment.
“There were actually a couple of times I started to worry about playing myself and how I would do it,” she says. “It was good to be there at the beginning when everybody was just getting started … and when it was finished it was quite nice to see them at the screening as everybody had really bonded and developed all these relationships.”
It is, however, at the mention of working on the 2019 Tim Winton adaptation of Dirt Music in Western Australia and the Kimberleys that Macdonald becomes most animated.
“I loooved Australia, I loved it,” she says. “I had such an adventurous time there. I know a lot of people travel all that way from the UK to Australia and they go to Sydney and Melbourne and Perth.
“The film was based in Perth for a bit, but I got to travel up and down the west coast, and I was in really extraordinary places. We would have to get ready for work in the morning in these little sort of shacks and then we would get boats to islands. It was amazing.”
Macdonald was born in Glasgow and, after her parents separated, she moved at the age of nine with her mother to a council estate on the city outskirts. She was working as a Glasgow barmaid when she saw a leaflet for an open casting call for Trainspotting. She won the role of Diane over thousands of applicants. She went on to play Peter Pan in Finding Neverland and won major roles as a lady’s maid in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park and as Deidre alongside Cillian Murphy and Colin Farrell in Intermission.
Since 2014 she has been back living in Glasgow. “I decompress here more than anywhere else,” she says. “I lived in London for a long, long time and I lived in New York for a good few years. I wish New York had been pre-children though. I mean, it was great, but I didn’t have that New York experience like a young person, with the night-life and everything. I was a mum, so it was a bit different. But Glasgow just felt like the right place again.”
In 2017 she separated from her husband, Dougie Payne, bassist with the Scottish rock band Travis. They co-parent their kids. “I am single at the moment,” she confides. How is that? “It’s fine. Not much I can do about it. Luckily, I’m fine in my own company.”
Luckily, too, she has managed to escape Covid-19. “I’m a bit of a hermit, so if I get it, it will be because of my kids. But so far so good.” The pandemic has not seriously impeded her acting.
“I’m not working at the moment, but I think there’s something imminent that I can’t really talk about. Last year I did a lovely little independent film called Typist Artist Pirate King that Carol Morley directed, and I did a Netflix film called I Came By with George MacKay and Hugh Bonneville.”
Was it hard being in a smaller albeit important role in Operation Mincemeat? “No, I love small roles in big shiny projects. I like getting lost in the mix, in a really good mix, in a great movie. Big ensembles are the way forward for me I think.”
See? Best friend material.
Operation Mincemeat opens in cinemas on Thursday.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout