Mackenzie Davis speaks with Esquire Middle East about Station Eleven, one of year’s most highly-acclaimed series, now streaming on Starzplay in the Middle East.
Read our full conversation below.
What was your personal way into this world, into this character? What did you connect with deeply on a personal level?
Initially, it was it was through Hiro and Patrick and their vision for the show. I had a very impactful Skype with him—before we were all on Zoom, it was Skype. They just laid out a really beautiful argument for resilience.
This is a post-apocalyptic show that depicts how humanity survived, not just humans, which I feel is missing from a lot of apocalyptic stories. With a lot of them, I can never quite understand why people keep fighting, because it seems like a living hell to be there. I really wanted to collaborate with the two of them.
And then, in the show itself, I liked this story of this transition from being a little girl who was an actress, a sort of impossible job, and then doing it under all circumstances, impossibly, in the future after [the end of the world]. There’s something so fairy tale about it, of being fated for something. That is not how I feel about myself, but I love this belief in herself that this little girl had, and I found it really inspiring. There’s something sort of magical about it, even though it’s not a magical story. It’s very grounded. So it’s a whole cocktail of things.
There is something about the current cultural imagination in which we can only imagine people getting worse, in the world getting worse, all of us devolving into worse versions of ourselves. I think the most radical thing you can do is have like something that’s hopeful and optimistic, and that’s what we have with Station Eleven.
Yeah, and that there’s an abundance of good people. That there is not only one good person that will not rape and kill you, but that there’s tons of people that will survive. And even the people that do ill—there’s a sort of invader character that we see later on in the show. And he’s played with so much tremulous sadness and fear, even though he is the sort of archetypal large man who’s very scary in this sort of ogre character, the way that actor played him is just so fearful and sad. And it was such a beautiful way in for me to understanding that everybody in this time is just scared as hell, and they might do harm, but that they’re all just trying to find like a place to be safe.
Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at why anyone would want to watch a pandemic show, right after an actual pandemic, it’s because it does show the ability for good to come next. I think that’s part of the reason it’s probably going to resonate. Have you thought about how it may go over with people?
I mean, I have no control over them. I care—I want people to like it, and I want things to be good and to move people but—this is not the question you’re asking, but the question of ‘how do you hope people receive the show’ and that question I don’t know the answer to. I hope people are moved by it, but they might not be and it might come out at the wrong time. There’s a million ways that something doesn’t quite suit the cultural moment.
This show I hope isn’t painted with such a broad brush of ‘a pandemic show’ because it’s really a show about making art and finding ways to survive, to survive exuberantly and abundantly, not just eke out a tiny little corner of the world but to do fantastic, big, bold, beautiful things after chaos, and that trauma can be a regenerative and beautiful tool. And I love that part of the show.
What was the most joyful moment for you on set? What was the most beauty that you had either in front of the camera behind it that has stuck with you?
I really loved working with Helen Shaver, one of our directors. She was there for I think three episodes, she was there for a lot of my stuff. She was somebody who I had endless conversations and committed companionship with and I really got a lot out of the relationship with her and processing what was a difficult thing to make. We had just gone through lockdown and pandemic and we were locked down again. At work, we would get to take our masks off and be around people. But then at home, we were all away from home locked in our apartments and echoing the same experience we just had. And she just spoke about all sorts of the meaning, in this lifestyle and the thing we were making and you know why we do what we do. I found it really like quite a beautiful way of processing both the year before and then that current time that we were in.
Station Eleven is now streaming on Starzplay