UK Edition
Kelly Macdonald interview: 'My Matrix audition was horrible'
Swallows and Amazons is worlds away from Kelly Macdonald’s own childhood – but the Emmy-winning actress is heading home for Trainspotting 2
For anyone who read Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons as a child, it just takes the title to whip up dreams of outdoor adventures: waves clucking on a dinghy’s hull, fluttering flysheets, blue wood smoke vanishing into a pewter sky. But to Kelly Macdonald, the words had long been a puzzle. She remembers knowing swallows and amazons went together, like jam roly-poly and custard. But having never been nudged towards Ransome’s book at home or school, she wasn’t sure why.
“Mine wasn’t a lakes-and-boats kind of childhood,” the actress says, sipping black coffee and fixing me with a look that says mind the understatement. “I grew up on a Glasgow council estate with a single mother. For our holidays we went to Grandma and Grandad’s caravan near Aberfoyle. So Ransome’s books just kind of bypassed me.
“And they can be quite traumatising, family holidays, when you’re stuck in a metal box.” That look again. “Particularly in Scotland. Most of my memories are the sound of rain on caravan roofs.”
You know Macdonald from all over the place. She was in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 2008, and Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, which should have done in 2002. In Trainspotting, her 1996 debut, she was Ewan McGregor’s Lolita-ish one-night stand Diane. In the American television drama Boardwalk Empire, she played the mistress (and later wife) Margaret Schroeder of the fraying gangster Nucky Thompson. In Brave, the Pixar animation, she voiced Princess Merida. She didn’t have Texas-trailer-park or below-stairs or heroin-addled or organised-crime-based or magic-and-archery-filled childhoods either. But work-wise, it hasn’t been an issue.
She’s 40 now, and a mother of two boys herself – her husband of 13 years is Dougie Payne, the smiley bassist from Glaswegian rock band Travis – and found her own parenting style to be at odds with that of her character Mrs Walker, Ransome’s unsung pioneer of the free-range parenting movement. Mrs Walker lets her four children loose on the Lakes, where they make camp, gut fish, sail dinghies – and, in the film, brush up against a Russian spy plot transposed into the film from Ransome’s own life.
I meet Macdonald in London a few days after the Swallows and Amazons world premiere. It took place 300 miles to the north, at the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, beneath the same mist-slung fells where the film was shot and Ransome wrote. She talks about her eight-year-old, Freddie, getting restless after the screening and asking if he could go outside to play on the theatre’s veranda. “And I had to think about it, and have a wee look around first to check it was OK,” she says, wincing. “And in the background, through the big glass windows, there was the lake, the island, freedom.”
Macdonald plays Mrs Walker with her own voice. She auditioned in standard-issue period-drama RP, and in the book her character hails from Australia. But director Philippa Lowthorpe and scriptwriter Andrea Gibb (who herself was born in Greenock) fancied her as a Scot.
“I do not believe it was to do with any bad accent on my part,” she says, chuckling. “I did an accent at the read-through, but Philippa and Andrea had this notion to make the mother Scottish because they thought she could have some fun with that.”
As for her period-appropriate nicotine habit – a highly unusual sight in a modern children’s film – “she’s just a bit more real and vital and feisty than mother figures usually are”, she says. “I’ve been playing Margaret on Boardwalk Empire for so long, I was just excited to be playing someone who wasn’t… troubled, for a bit.”
Macdonald is absurdly easy company – she talks like an old school friend you haven’t seen for years: lots of news to fill you in on, but in an open, unbusinesslike way for which a primly held coffee cup serves as a perfect prop.
The big recent development, of course, is the announcement of T2, Danny Boyle’s long-awaited follow-up to Trainspotting, the film that made him the most exciting British film-maker around and Macdonald a star overnight. Boyle has been talking about the project for years – a new story roughly based on Porno, Irvine Welsh’s own sequel novel, published in 2002.
Shooting is already under way under the kind of vice-like secrecy normally reserved for a Star Wars film. We already know that original cast members Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle are returning. Will she be joining them? Her face twinkles like a mirrorball.
“I don’t know,” she says jovially. “Will I? Don’t know.” A very long silence. “Sorry!” (I’ve since heard from someone else connected to the production – and I promise Macdonald didn’t give this away herself – that the plan as of around two weeks ago was for Diane to appear in the new film.)
Macdonald was only ever Diane in the first place because she answered an open audition for the part, and kept climbing up a shortlist made up of “thousands of girls, then hundreds, then 10, then four, then two, then me”.
As a child she loved the idea of acting, but didn’t think it was for her: “It wasn’t like a job you could really have,” she says. The films she loved when she was younger were Hollywood musicals – Calamity Jane and Singin’ in the Rain were two favourites. “And I remember being slightly peeved at my parents for not being American or having moved to America when I was born. Because I thought to do that for a living, you had to come from somewhere other than the Southside of Glasgow.”
Her father Archie, a painter and decorator, left the family home when she was nine years old; until then, the Macdonalds had been comfortable, but Archie’s departure meant tightened purse strings and a move for Kelly, her mother Patsy and younger brother David from the Southside’s urban bustle to social housing in Newton Mearns, a midcentury suburb south of the city.
As a teenager she took waitressing jobs, which led to a stint in a fish-and-chip shop: she worked evenings, and for a while life smelt of molten beef dripping. She also worked in telesales, selling double-glazing from a room with no windows.
She remembers working in a bar on Renfrew Street, between the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal Conservatoire, and “just being able to sense” who the art and drama students were. “They were very loud and confident, and that wasn’t me. I was a bit concerned that the thing that I dreamt of doing wasn’t a good fit.”
Those dreams had been kindled in early childhood – both by Hollywood and TV advertisements, which Macdonald used to recite to herself, perfecting the (usually English) accents of the kids that appeared in them. She vaguely recalls one for detergent – maybe Ariel or Persil – in which a boy with a London accent said the words “my mum’s swimming suit”, and she recited it like a mantra, flattening down her round Glaswegian vowels until the sounds perfectly overlapped. “I just had a good ear,” she says, shrugging.
When she was 19, she was handed a leaflet for the Trainspotting cattle call in a record shop during her lunch break, which said the makers of Shallow Grave were looking for “the new Patricia Arquette”. She went along looking for a confidence boost, hoping that it might spur her to apply for drama school: a few rounds later, she found herself sitting on a double bed with sheets hung around it, faking sex noises with Ewan McGregor. Until the day she got the part she was convinced she wouldn’t, but Boyle clearly remembers seeing her in the hallway on day one and thinking “I bet that’s Diane”.
Trainspotting felt significant as soon as those iconic tangerine line-up posters appeared all over the country: Macdonald was second from the left, between Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller, leaning forward and snarling in a party dress. As her first film, she had nothing to compare it with, “but I think the others knew something big was afoot”.
She seized on the success, and flew to New York to audition for the lead female part in Scorsese’s 1999 thriller Bringing Out the Dead – which she lost out on, ironically, to the “old” Patricia Arquette. She met the casting director at her apartment, “and we got in a cab and went to Marty’s town house, and he was so lovely”, she says, beaming. Though she didn’t win that role, she made enough of an impression for Scorsese to get back in touch a decade later while casting the Boardwalk Empire pilot.
She also tried out for the role of Trinity in The Matrix – “though everyone was doing it”, she speedily clarifies. “It wasn’t like they said, ‘We should get a wee shortlist together and Kelly Macdonald has to be on it.’ ” The audition itself “was horrible”, she says: “It was on tape, but I hope it’s been destroyed.” The disaster was largely down to her not reading the script in advance and having no idea what the Matrix itself actually was. “Which was a bit of a mistake,” she says, grimacing. “I was a complete idiot about it.”
She read through the scene where Trinity first meets Neo, Keanu Reeves’s character, at a nightclub, then threw some punches at a sparring bag. “They asked me to take a run-up and just attack it. I did a very bad job.” Almost two decades on, she hasn’t yet managed to watch the film, but drily adds she’s aware it has something to do with “people who wear black and have sunglasses”.
It’s tempting to imagine a parallel timeline in which Macdonald became a high-kicking action-movie warrior woman – all Amazon, no swallows. As it is, she just flung the veranda door of her life wide open, stepped out, and went exploring.
Swallows and Amazons is out in UK cinemas from August 19