The 1917 star on revisiting ‘Climategate’, his struggles to grow a beard and finding his inner wolf
Hammersmith-born George MacKay, 29, began his acting career aged 10, playing one of the Lost Boys in PJ Hogan’s live-action Peter Pan film. Subsequent roles include Pride, True History of the Kelly Gang, Sunshine on Leith and the lead in Sam Mendes’s Oscar-winning first world war epic 1917. Next, he stars in the films Wolf and Munich: The Edge of War, along with BBC One dram The Trick, about the 2009 “Climategate” email hacking scandal.
You’re about to start filming Shane Meadows’s new TV drama, The Gallows Pole. What can you tell us?
I’ve been a fan of Shane’s since for ever so it’s cool to be working with him. I’m going for my costume fitting tomorrow, then we start shooting in Yorkshire. It’s based on Ben Myers’s novel about an 18th-century gang called the Cragg Vale Coiners who started counterfeiting money out on the moors. They clipped coins on a massive scale but there was also a community aspect. It was pre-Industrial Revolution and local people were starving, so they found a way to make their own money and stick it to the man, as it were.
