Emma Mackey on Her Journey From Sex Education to Ella McCay

In Emma Mackey’s very first screen role, on the Netflix series Sex Education, she played a rebellious teen. As the star of James L. Brooks’ new film Ella McCay, the British-French actor felt she truly had to grow up.

That’s partly the nature of what the director was asking her to do. In Brooks’ screwball comedy about an ambitious politician, Mackey mainly plays Ella at age 34. At the time of filming, Mackey, now 29, was merely 27. 

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“I’m playing someone who’s been through different checkpoints in her life, and ones I haven’t been through yet,” Mackey says over Zoom, wearing an oversized white turtleneck sweater. “And I learned a lot from this character.” 

But Ella McCay is also a point of maturation for Mackey’s career, as she goes from Netflix breakout to leading the first film in 15 years from a beloved, Oscar-winning American auteur.

And yet, she’s used to having these kinds of experiences, where she’s shot out of proverbial cannons into major pop culture moments. In a way, Mackey’s whole career has been, in her words, a “baptism of fire.” 

“I’m constantly pleasantly baffled at how things have wound up,” she says. 

Mackey grew up in what she calls the “middle of nowhere” in northwest France before moving to the UK for university. (Her mother is English and Mackey was raised bilingual.) After decamping to London, she worked odd jobs while taking acting classes and applying to drama school. She didn’t get into any, and didn’t have the money to go anyway, but found an agent and within six months booked Sex Education, the cheeky, BAFTA-winning show about a boy who starts offering sex therapy for his peers at secondary school. She played Maeve, an outcast in thick eyeliner, who becomes both accomplice and love interest for the protagonist Otis (Asa Butterfield).

“I was really unsure about Sex Ed,” she remembers. “I remember talking about it at length like, Am I going to play 17?” (She was, by then, well into her 20s.) “And have to do sex stuff in my first ever job? Is that cool? I have grandparents.'”

The series turned out to be a hit for the streaming service and ran for four seasons. In the middle of shooting the final one, she started to audition for Ella McCay. 

She’d go back and forth to London to meet with Brooks, best known for classics like Terms of Endearment, As Good as it Gets, and Broadcast News, whose star Albert Brooks plays the outgoing governor and mentor to Mackey’s character in Ella McCay. Director Brooks and casting director Francine Maisler led her through four-hour sessions of reading scenes and trying different beats. “It was a process, for sure,” she says.

Brooks has imbued his latest with a hefty dose of wackiness. Narrated by Ella’s assistant played by Julie Kavner—Marge Simpson, herself—it jumps around in time to paint a portrait of this force of a character determined to use her role in government for good. 

The main action takes place in 2008, when Ella is elevated from lieutenant governor to governor of her unspecified home state. At the same time, she becomes threatened by a minor scandal involving her dopey husband (Jack Lowden), all while dealing with her dysfunctional family, including the serial-cheater father (Woody Harrelson) who reenters her life and a brother (Spike Fearn) who has become something of a hermit. All the while, Ella is the kind of policy wonk who actually seeks to enact real change, much to the chagrin of her jaded colleagues. (The similarity between Mackey and McCay’s names is entirely coincidental, Mackey says. “It’s a real talking point,” Mackey says. “That was the name he came up with.”) 

Brooks is working in a familiar mode here. Ella has shades of Holly Hunter’s intense, workaholic producer Jane from Brooks’ 1987 masterpiece Broadcast News, the smartest person in any room who both exhausts and enchants everyone around her.

“I think it’s very true to him,” Mackey says. “I think he knows this woman.” 

But Mackey had to figure out how to play her. The American accent came easily; Mackey had to dig deeper to figure out how to jump between all the different ages Brooks wanted to represent on screen since we also see Ella as a nerdy teenager meeting her first love, grieving the loss of her mother, and settling into living with her fiercely loving and protective aunt (Jamie Lee Curtis). At first, Mackey says, she put Ella on a “pedestal,” something she tends to do with roles she loves.

“I think I sort of idealized her in the beginning,” she says. “And then I had to learn to see her as a whole person, broken parts and all.” 

Along the way, Mackey also had meetings with officials who are in similar positions to Ella in government, sitting in on a few meetings, and learning about the U.S. system. She’s coy about who was involved in that research process. 

“I’m loath to talk about it too much because I know that it’s not really a political movie,” she says. “I read it as such in the beginning, but that is very much the backdrop.” 

Although you can read the film as an optimistic fantasy about a politician who is truly fighting the good fight, harkening back to the Obama era, Mackey sees it as more about Ella’s work ethic, which she applies not only to her job, but also to dealing with all the people in her orbit.  

“She’s a public servant,” she says. “That’s really what this is about. It’s about being of service to people, and that happens to also be true of her family.” 

While Ella has had perhaps almost too much life experience for her 34 years, Mackey herself still feels like she’s on the cusp of adulthood. Because of that, she says, she’s trying to be “mindful” about what directions her career is taking. Ella McCay “felt like something to get my teeth stuck into,” she adds, giving her the opportunity to be around Brooks’ legendary brain. 

She’s currently a little over halfway done shooting Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, where she reunites with Greta Gerwig, who previously gave her a small part in Barbie. This time, however, she has a much bigger role, playing the villainous Jadis, otherwise known as the White Witch.

“Every film is a miracle, especially when the stakes are high for a Narnia or a Jim Brooks return,” Mackey says. 

Mackey also has a role in an upcoming J.J. Abrams blockbuster, but she’s certain acting isn’t her only calling.  She’s putting it on record that she would like to direct one day, though she’s still working on figuring it all out. 

“I’m constantly oscillating between I know I need to grow up, but I also want to stay really young,” she says. “And I’m really young in my perception of things. I’m still working on that, guys.”