Mackenzie Davis brings a strong left-of-centre presence to her roles. Credit: Celeste Sloman for The New York
For someone who has played a super soldier in Terminator: Dark Fate and a replicant in Blade Runner 2049, Mackenzie Davis has never been more human than in the thriller Speak No Evil.
Sure, she’s cowering in a bathroom while hiding from a rampaging James McAvoy, but she does so while wearing yellow rubber gloves. A practical addition for anyone in fear of their life.
“I didn’t want to get whatever I was using on my hands,” deadpans Davis over Zoom, with her Blue Heeler mix dog (“she has an Australian vibe”) barking in the background.
Speak No Evil is a creeping psychological thriller doubling as a pitch-black comedy of manners, where the fear of being impolite to new friends is more paramount than running for your life. Davis plays Louise Dalton, who is on holiday with her husband Ben (Scoot McNairy) and their daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) in Tuscany when they meet McAvoy’s garrulous Paddy, his wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and their son Ant (Dan Hough).
Agnes Dalton (Alix West Lefler), Louise Dalton (Mackenzie Davis) and Ben Dalton (Scoot McNairy) in Speak No Evil,
At first, the Daltons, who are Americans living in London, consider their new friends to be a little boorish, but they eventually click, so when Paddy asks them to come and visit his isolated home in England’s west country, they agree.
After they arrive, however, Louise and Ben become increasingly uncomfortable with their hosts’ behaviour, so much so that an innocent inquiry of “Everything all right in there?” feels more of a threat than a welfare check. The real danger, as far as the Daltons see it, is social death.
“It feels like social horror more than conventional horror,” says Davis. “The horror of saying the wrong thing, of misunderstanding a situation in a way that could be perceived as gravely insensitive or politically incorrect, or any number of things. But how much energy is spent muting your impulses to make sure that you’re being polite and nice and, you know, aware of all the dynamics in a room, and sometimes that leads you to get murdered.”
A rampaging James McAvoy in Speak No Evil.
That is not a spoiler, folks; Davis is joking, which is typical of her very dry Canadian sense of humour. Over our 20-minute conversation, she is delightfully deadpan, deciding that if she were in the same situation as Louise, she would do a runner. “I’m really good at lying,” she says. “If I don’t want to be somewhere, I would 100 per cent lie and leave really early on.”
Ever since her first film, Smashed, in 2015, Davis has built a solid foundation of work, from the cult TV series Halt and Catch Fire and Black Mirror to the big-screen sci-fi blockbusters Terminator: Dark Fate, Blade Runner 2049 and The Martian. Then came the eerily prescient 2021 HBO hit Station Eleven, which imagined a world where 99 per cent of the population had died in a global pandemic.
In all of these works, Davis has proved – in the best kind of way – a left-of-centre presence, sometimes nervy, sometimes strong, but never taking a backward step. For a while, she was pigeonholed as being the “sci-fi girl” but it’s not something the 37-year-old was ever consciously choosing.
Scoot McNairy (left), Mackenzie Davis and Lee Pace in the cult TV series Halt and Catch Fire.
“No, I think everything’s just like a huge weird coincidence where I was doing sci-fi for a while because those were just the parts that I got,” she says. “I mean, not just that, but they were really interesting directors or once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. I got to work with Ridley Scott – Blade Runner is my favourite movie of all time – and I got to work on the sequel with Denis Villeneuve, who’s one of my favourite directors of all time.
“And being in Terminator is like, why would you not? You’re never going to regret that. It’s so insane to be a super-human in the future. One should always take that opportunity.”
And that, really, is the joy of acting. In what other world will you ever get to chase James McAvoy with an axe or pretend you’re talking to Matt Damon in space like she did in The Martian?
“It’s fun, and it’s stupid sometimes,” she says. “But, you know, there’s plenty of hours spent sitting in a room by yourself wondering when you’ll work – and that’s while you’re on set – but then you also get to do really insane stuff that you’re like, ‘Well, at what other time would I be doing this particular thing?’ It’s cool to have the opportunity.”
Mackenzie Davis as Grace, the Resistance super soldier, in Terminator: Dark Fate.
In Speak No Evil, Davis is another left-of-centre presence. Her character is a not-so-typical horror heroine and very relatable because of it, especially when she’s spotting red flags and her husband keeps telling her to relax, and she is probably overreacting (she is not).
“I really relate to the feeling of having to eat shit sometimes,” says Davis. “Knowing that I’m right, that there’s a certain amount of social grace that’s required, but I’m like, ‘You will rue the day you cross me’.”
Is that Canadian politeness?
“No, I don’t think that’s Canadian,” she says. “I’m just waiting for the other shoe to fall. I don’t know, sometimes I feel like I have a little alarm in my head of how many things I can call out in a given day in a given group of people. And it’s not every day, obviously, or every group of people, but sometimes, you know, through work or other circumstances, you find yourself with people who just say the most offensive things all the time, and you’re like, ‘Oh god, I’ve already used my tally of, like, 10 noes today’.
Mackenzie Davis feels a kinship with her character Louise in the thriller Speak No Evil.
“I felt this sort of kinship with Louise, not on everything about her, but certainly on this sort of root feeling of wanting to be easier, wanting to be an easier person, wanting to be one of the group, where everything just rolled off her back, but instead it’s quite a muscular effort that was pretty visible by everyone around her.”
The film is an English adaptation of a 2022 Danish film of the same name, which became infamous after it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It was hailed as a “social satire with razor-sharp teeth”, with one person commenting that the real horror of the film was that a Danish couple would even visit the house of new friends (a real Scandinavian no-no, apparently).
This English version, adapted and directed by UK director James Watkins, strays from the Danish film’s plot but still packs a bloody punch.
“I mean – full disclosure, I keep repeating this so I don’t have to just sound like a talking point – but I do believe this, that there’s something nice about approaching remakes as experiments that are being replayed with different subjects,” says Davis. “In the original, there’s a Danish and a Dutch couple, and the thing that’s being explored is those cultural dynamics.
“And if you approach it with that experiment metaphor, then we’re just swapping out the subjects of the experiment, and you’re going to have a different result with people who’ve been raised and socialised in America and in England than you are with the original subjects.
“But I love the original ending. I like the darkest shit in the world, and it’s so great what they did, but I also like what we did, and I think both things can exist and that it can be fun to see how different people react in the same situation.”
Davis is currently filming another Scandinavian adaptation, The Undertow, in which she stars opposite Jamie Dornan (“My god. What an angel. I mean, I think him and James McAvoy are real good boys”), but she says there is no real career plan in place.
“I ask myself that all the time, ‘Is there a plan?’” she says. “Does anyone have one? I think it’s just like, ‘Does this person or this role or this story turn me on?’ And sometimes it’s all three, like the director or the actor or the story or the role, or all four, or sometimes it’s two, and that’s enough. And sometimes it’s all four, and that’s not enough.
“It’s like magic. Like, how do you fall in love with somebody? And sometimes you just date somebody because they’re different from the last person you dated. And sometimes you date somebody because you’ve gone through enough experience and you’re making really great choices. But sometimes you’re like, ‘Oh, I just want to ride on the back of a motorcycle.’ There’s all sorts of weird reasons for doing things, and I don’t have any good ones.”
Speak No Evil is released in cinemas on September 12.
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