Mackenzie Davis catches fire
Pandemic put halt to her career momentum, but actor now taking next step with lead role in ‘Station Eleven’
Actor Mackenzie Davis, 34, is perhaps best known for her roles in the technodystopian Netflix series “Black Mirror” and as a mechanically enhanced super soldier in the 2019 “Terminator” movie, “Dark Fate.” But fans and critics have known her longer, owing particularly to her role as the programming virtuoso Cameron Howe on AMC’s “Halt and Catch Fire.”
Now she is starring as Kirsten Raymonde in “Station Eleven,” a 10-part limited series from HBO Max that has been adapted from the 2014 science fiction novel by Emily St. John Mandel. Given the book’s runaway success — it won the Arthur C. Clarke award and has sold more than 1.5 million copies — the adaptation seems likely to draw Davis further into the spotlight. So does the timing: The story revolves around a deadly pandemic and its aftermath.
But despite its sci-fi premise, “Station Eleven” isn’t styled as fantasy; it concerns itself more with investigating tragedy, personal trials and the marks they leave behind — an uncanny future artifact of our very real pandemic age.
For Davis, playing Kirsten was an opportunity to demonstrate her emotional range. It was also a chance for her to grapple with her own intense feelings of loss and isolation.
“It’s been an unsettling few years,” Davis said, with a flat laugh.
Davis grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, went to college in Montreal and then moved to New York for two years to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse, an acting conservatory in Manhattan. After she scored her first major role in an indie film, Drake Doremus’ “Breathe In” (2014), she traveled out west to Los Angeles in search of an agent and eventually settled there. She landed her breakout role in “Halt and Catch Fire” a few months later.
“Halt,” lasting four seasons (2014-17), was a steady part of Davis’ life for five years. Although the series never drew a big audience, it quietly gained a devoted following, aided in recent years by Netflix. Critics consistently praised it, placing the series on many major “Best of ” lists.
Christopher Cantwell, a creator and showrunner of “Halt,” said in an email that Davis “can play intentions and emotions simultaneously that are usually diametrically opposed to each other. She can play incredible anxiety and
overconfidence all at once.”
Davis’ career was gaining speed: Just after the third season of “Halt,” in 2016, she appeared in the “Black Mirror” episode “San Junipero” alongside Gugu Mbatha-Raw, an installment that won two Emmys. After “Halt,” Davis appeared in Denis Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner 2049” and then in Jason Reitman’s “Tully” (2018) alongside Charlize Theron. She still seemed lightly
stunned when she recalled that period.
“Doing those two films back to back felt like —” she paused and shook her head slowly from side to side. “It felt like: This is the work I want to be doing. I was working at a level that I had only fantasized about.”
Her lead role in “Station” seemed like a natural next step, but 2020 put a halt to the momentum. Like most people, Davis faced her share of challenges.
Her long-term relationship ended shortly before lockdown; production froze on “Station.” She entered quarantine alone — a “storm of isolation and loneliness,” as she described it. Eventually, she moved to London, in need of a fresh start.
Then in January, she went to work on “Station Eleven,” where each day demanded a thinly veiled reenactment of tragedies of the previous year.
Davis’ character required her to navigate a multitude of identities: Kirsten is a member of the Traveling Symphony, an itinerant group of musicians and actors traversing the postpandemic landscape. Equally comfortable on stage (she’s the troupe’s Hamlet) or wielding a knife, Kirsten is at once a fiercely protective mother figure and a damaged young woman. She was 8 years old (played in an earlier timeline by Matilda
Lawler) when the deadly flu hit, and “Station Eleven” spends much of its time digging into her memories, tying her actions in the present to the horrors of those early days. Davis’ eyes, limpid and expressive, flash from wariness to sorrow, then back.
When Patrick Somerville, the series’ showrunner, and Hiro Murai, who directed its first and third episodes, first approached Davis about playing Kirsten, she wasn’t sold. She had just wrapped her role in “Terminator,” and Kirsten seemed too similar.
But after talking with Somerville and Murai, she was persuaded. Kirsten seemed powerful in a different way.
“Violence is a part of her world,” Davis explained, “but it’s not the banner of her reality.”
Instead, her strength lies in her emotional depth: She loves profoundly, and she has an intuitive sense for people’s feelings and intentions. The qualities that make Kirsten a good Shakespearean actor also help her survive a post-pandemic landscape.
In one of Davis’ strongest scenes, Hamlet, as played by Kirsten, grieves his father’s death, standing on a makeshift stage surrounded by flickering candles. Staring into the darkness, Kirsten’s mind shifts to her childhood, when she learned that her parents were dead. Davis’ face holds both moments in her character’s life at once, past and present.
“There’s an impossible ocean of subtext” in those scenes, Somerville said. “After the fact, I was constantly realizing that Mackenzie had played three looks in a row, invisibly. She was meticulously making bridges between moments, already doing the thing I hoped to build with the show’s nonlinear flashbacks.”
When asked about her acting in those layered moments Somerville described, Davis leaned forward.
“Like anybody else, I had a number of hugely upsetting events happen in the last two years,” Davis said. “There was all of this ambiguous trauma that didn’t really have a home because everybody was feeling everything — and where do you put trauma that is persistent and doesn’t begin or end but is just part of, like, a great, general sense of loss?”
A little out of breath, she gave a crooked half-smile, as if amused by her own fervor, and sat back in her chair.
“Then, suddenly,” she said, “I was telling a story within a house that could hold all of those feelings.”