Thomasin McKenzie is especially good at showing the effort of going unnoticed. We rate her precise physical acting: in a hunched posture or a suddenly unguarded look, she can make a quiet character’s desires plain.
Fi1m perspective
In Eileen (2023), Thomasin McKenzie hunches, watches the people around her and eats sweets from a desk drawer. Her Eileen Dunlop has become good at going unnoticed, and is beginning to resent it. McKenzie lets a look suggest that this apparently meek woman might have plans of her own. William Oldroyd gets fine work from her by allowing her to be watchful, awkward and occasionally funny without explaining every change.
The breakthrough was Leave No Trace (2018), a lead role opposite Ben Foster that established her gift for understated performance. Supporting work in Jojo Rabbit (2019) brought wider notice, followed by the lead in Edgar Wright’s psychological horror Last Night in Soho (2021). Her casting has often returned to sheltered or isolated young women facing unfamiliar experiences.
In Eileen, we felt her excitement when Rebecca entered the office, because McKenzie’s face changed after so much guarded watching. Anne Hathaway gives her someone worth staring at, with the good coat, the cigarettes and the easy disregard for the prison’s men. Editor Nick Emerson lets Eileen’s daydreams interrupt ordinary shots and then cuts them short, so her private thoughts become difficult to separate from what is happening. McKenzie keeps the woman credible while the cutting makes us doubt the scene. The film’s later change of genre is less convincing, but the problem is not a shortage of feeling in its lead.
The Testament of Ann Lee (2025) gives her the opposite task, and it suits her less well. As the follower Mary Partington, she also narrates, repeatedly explaining what the pictures have already made clear. We blamed the writing rather than McKenzie: an actor who can make us study a face is being asked to tell us what to think. The film is worth seeing for its singing and stamping congregation and Amanda Seyfried, but the narration keeps interrupting precisely what makes it interesting.
She need not be confined to quiet, wounded young women. The slyness of Eileen suggests how much more there is to do with resentment and comedy. Start there for her performance, provided a film that mishandles its final stretch will not spoil the evening.
Biography
Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie (born 26 July 2000) is a New Zealand actress. She is the daughter of actress and acting coach Miranda Harcourt and director Stuart McKenzie, and the granddaughter of actress Dame Kate Harcourt. She began acting as a child and had a minor role in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014).
McKenzie rose to prominence with the lead role in Debra Granik's Leave No Trace (2018), for which she received the National Board of Review Award for Breakthrough Performance. She has since appeared in supporting roles in Jojo Rabbit (2019), The King (2019), True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), Old (2021), Last Night in Soho (2021) and The Power of the Dog (2021). She played the title role in Eileen (2023) and Mary Partington in The Testament of Ann Lee (2025).
