“There’s a quiet kind of oceanic love between them, because it’s deep and it’s heavy,” MacKay says. ”It has the power of fireworks, but not the visibility of fireworks.”
MacKay’s immersive work on the film involved sending letters back and forth with Edgar-Jones in character, and decidedly not watching the 1995 version. “I hadn’t watched it, and I didn’t want to,” he says. “Because you’re either going to want to cherry-pick the best bits because they were so brilliant, or actively go against them [even though] that’s the best choice anyway.”
He was anxious about taking on this particular role, perhaps in part because playing the guy whom the audience needs to fall for is not really something you can train for. “This is probably the most romantic role [I’ve done],” MacKay says, as he sidesteps a pile of deer poo. “If I’m really honest, of course there’s a slightly self-conscious question of: Am I up to it? And you don’t want to say that out loud, because that doesn’t feel inherently like the men that are romantic leads, brimming with confidence and chutzpah.”
Edgar-Jones, however, reckons he was the perfect man to play Edward. “He imbued Edward with such depth of emotion and restrained feeling,” she says, “bringing all the intensity to their love story each day on screen.”
I suggest that Edward represents a strand of masculinity that feels rare, though not extinct, in the modern era – where respect and honour are valued above bravado. And it sounds like that’s exactly what made the character appeal to MacKay. “That level of courtesy and respect and sort of a kind of quiet romantic presence, it felt like… It’s a nice man to step into his shoes, especially nowadays,” he says.
George MacKay’s life has changed a lot in the years since 1917 ran the awards-season gamut in 2020, but it hasn’t played out quite as I expected. That film was that rare thing in the modern movie era: a meticulously crafted drama that was both a huge commercial success (taking in £333 million at the global box office) and an awards darling (it was nominated for 10 Oscars and won three). And it lived and died by MacKay’s performance – as a British soldier sent on an apparent suicide mission across enemy lines at the sharp end of WWI, the camera tracks him for the entire run time. It fell upon him to perfectly sell the emotion – and, perhaps more difficult, the active repression of emotion – brought on by the horrors he’s living through.
