Emma Mackey

Watch Mackey in the toilet block in Sex Education (2019), listening to Asa Butterfield's Otis explain something he has read about and never done. Everyone else in Laurie Nunn's school is performing at full volume: Ncuti Gatwa's Eric dresses like a firework, Gillian Anderson's Jean interrogates teenagers over toast. Mackey does almost nothing. She stands still, she looks slightly worn, and she waits for the boy to finish. Teenagers on television are allowed to be angry, funny or heartbroken; Mackey plays Maeve as something rarer, which is tired.

It was her first professional job, taken with an English degree from Leeds and no drama school behind her, which may be why there is so little visible acting in it. She stayed with Maeve for four seasons, from 2019 to 2023, and the show was better in its first two than its last two, though that was Nunn's problem rather than hers. Film came in the gaps: Eiffel (2021), Kenneth Branagh's Death on the Nile (2022) as Jacqueline de Bellefort, then a first lead in Emily (2022) as Emily Brontë, where the reviews noticed what we had noticed in the toilet block, a directness that makes a period character look like someone you could argue with. We have not reviewed Emily and will not judge it. The casting sounds right.

Barbie (2023) is the one film of hers we have reviewed, and it barely counts. Greta Gerwig bills her in the top ten as one of the Barbies and gives her, along with Issa Rae, Hari Nef and Sharon Rooney, perhaps a dozen lines between the four of them. A film about women being able to be anything gave most of its women little to be, and Mackey was one of them. She has said of the shoot, "I learnt so much. It was life-changing." We believe her. We could not see it on the screen.

The pattern so far is that she is cast as the clever, independent girl, the one who has read the book and is not impressed, and she is good at it. The risk is that a part built on reacting leaves her stranded when the writing thins, and the reviews of Ella McCay (2025), her first title role, found the character hard to believe and too often reacting to other people. We were moved by Maeve more than a school comedy set in a toilet block had any right to manage, and it was the tiredness that did it, the sense of a girl already paying for things her classmates had not yet noticed cost anything. That is the note nobody else has asked her to play again.

Gerwig has cast her a second time, as the White Witch in her Narnia. It is the first part anyone has offered her that is not a version of the girl who knows better, and a villain worn down by her own winter would be a good use of what she has. Until then, the first two seasons of Sex Education are where to find her.