Thomasin McKenzie, the Actress From the Edge of the Frame Now Playing Audrey Hepburn

Thomasin McKenzie

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/drlovell/ / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 26, 2000 Wellington, New Zealand
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Jojo Rabbit, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Last Night in Soho
Awards	National Board of Review · Alliance of Women Film Journalists

Watch Thomasin McKenzie’s films back to back and a pattern shows up in the blocking. She is the girl hidden behind the wall in Jojo Rabbit, the daughter living off the grid with her father in Leave No Trace, the Danish bride standing a pace behind Timothée Chalamet in The King, the young housemaid glimpsed in the corners of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. Directors keep putting her at the edge of the frame because she can do something there that most actors cannot: she makes listening look like an action. The question her career is now asking is what happens when the camera stops looking past her. Paul Greengrass‘s The Uprising has just put her back in cinemas beside Andrew Garfield, and the next film on her slate asks her to play Audrey Hepburn, the face cinema has looked at harder than almost any other.

Acting ran in the family long before it ran in her. McKenzie was born and raised in Wellington, New Zealand, the daughter of the actress and acting coach Miranda Harcourt and the director Stuart McKenzie; her grandmother, Kate Harcourt, was an actress too. As a child she wanted to be a vet or a zookeeper. The sets came anyway. She had a small part in the New Zealand feature Existence, played the young Louise Nicholas in the television film Consent: The Louise Nicholas Story, turned up as Astrid in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and did stints on the soap Shortland Street, all while still a pupil at Samuel Marsden Collegiate School in Karori.

The door opened in a forest outside Portland. Debra Granik cast her as Tom in Leave No Trace, a teenager living in a public park with her father, a war veteran played by Ben Foster who refuses to live inside the system. The film premiered at Sundance in 2018, the year she finished school and, that July, turned 18, and almost all of its tension sits on her face as she works out, scene by scene, that the life she has been given is not one she wants. McKenzie has said she has never had formal acting training; to build the bond with Foster she used a “hug to connect” exercise learned from her mother. The National Board of Review gave her its breakthrough performance award, and nominations followed at the Critics’ Choice, Gotham and Independent Spirit awards.

What came next was a sprint. In 2019 she was Philippa of Denmark in David Michôd’s The King, Elsa Korr, the Jewish girl concealed in a Nazi household, in Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit, and Mary Hearn in Justin Kurzel’s True History of the Kelly Gang. Netflix’s Lost Girls came the following year. Then, in a single year, M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, the New Zealand drama The Justice of Bunny King, Campion’s The Power of the Dog and Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, which gave her the lead as Eloise, a fashion student from Cornwall who slips each night into the 1960s life of a singer played by Anya Taylor-Joy.

Here the received story of McKenzie, the quiet prodigy moving from strength to strength, needs correcting. The films that made her name are ones in which she is the observer. When she has carried the film herself the results have been more uneven. Last Night in Soho divided critics over its final act. Eileen, William Oldroyd’s adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel, in which she plays the title role, a secretary at a 1960s Massachusetts juvenile prison who falls under the spell of Anne Hathaway’s psychologist, drew some of the best notices of her career, with Moshfegh saying she seemed born to play the part, yet it took about $1.7 million at the North American box office. And in The Uprising the reviews split on whether Greengrass, who invented her character, gave her enough to do. McKenzie herself has spoken openly about anxiety and impostor syndrome, which makes the pattern harder to read as pure strategy. It may simply be that the industry has been slower than her audience to believe she can stand in the middle.

The leading parts have kept coming regardless. She played Ursula Todd, a woman who dies and is born again over and over, in the BBC Two adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, and in Netflix’s Joy she was Jean Purdy, the nurse and embryologist whose work alongside Bill Nighy’s Patrick Steptoe and James Norton’s Robert Edwards led to the first baby conceived through IVF, a woman history had mostly left out of the picture. In June 2023 she left Wellington for Islington, in north London.

Her last two years have been a study in range. She went broad in Fackham Hall, a period-drama spoof co-written by Jimmy Carr, and then served as narrator and moral centre of Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, playing Mary Partington, the closest friend of Amanda Seyfried’s Shaker leader, in a film that competed at Venice and reached American cinemas on Christmas Day 2025. The Uprising, set during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, opened in the United States on 10 September 2026 and reaches British cinemas on 9 October. She plays Alyce, a woman who joins the march and falls in with Garfield’s Ploughman, a character Greengrass wrote to stand for the women of the revolt. Next is Victorian Psycho, Zachary Wigon’s adaptation of Virginia Feito’s novel, which premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in May; she plays Miss Lamb, a nursemaid at a remote gothic manor who befriends the unsettling new governess played by Maika Monroe, and Bleecker Street opens it in American cinemas on 13 November. She has also joined the third season of Prime Video’s Fallout in a recurring role, and the horror film Rule of Three, directed by James Roday Rodriguez, is in post-production.

The test that matters most is still to come. In Dinner with Audrey, directed by Abe Sylvia and shot in Budapest, McKenzie plays Hepburn at 24, in Paris in 1953, sent by Billy Wilder to find clothes for Sabrina and talking her way into the atelier of a young Hubert de Givenchy, played by Ansel Elgort. Michael Shannon, Miranda Richardson, as Hepburn’s mother, and Judy Greer, as the costume designer Edith Head, complete the cast. Hepburn is one of the actresses McKenzie names as an inspiration. No release date has been set, but when the film arrives, the actress who has spent a decade at the edge of the frame will be standing in the one spot of it that nobody can look away from.

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Last Night in Soho (2021) — The Uprising (2026) — as Alyce

Tags: actors, actresses, Andrew Garfield, The Uprising, Thomasin McKenzie, Audrey Hepburn

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