George MacKay has gone from playing a hero on the battlefield of Wo✤rld War I to an outlaw in a dress.
The 28-year-old British actor, whose career exploded last year as Lance Cpl. Schofield in Best Picture nominee “1917,” is starring in out Friday on digital streaming and cable platforms, as the 19th-century Australian folk ওhero Ned Kelly. The controversial bushranger was once feared Down Under for killing cops to d🥀efy the British colonists, but today is considered an Aussie Robin Hood with a blood lust.
MacKay, whose father is Australian, started out with a casual knowl💎ed♔ge of the tale.
“All I knew of Ned Kelly is his name, the image of the helmet and the bulletproof armor h🔯e made,” MacKay tells The Post of the impenetrable shields Kelly and his cohorts would wear during 🅘shootouts with police. “A lot of people know the myth, but we don’t know the ins and outs of who that man was.”
So the actor’s preparation for the part involved forgetting the little he did know. MacKay saw Heath Ledger’s performance as in the title role of “Ned Kelly” at the movies when he was 11 years old, coincidentally while in Australia making one of his first films, 2003’s “Peter Pan.” “But I chose not to rewatch it,” he says. “And I chose not to watch the [1970] Mick Jagger version just so that I could have a clean slate.”
His sꦇlate may be squeaky clean, but his character is muddy, scratched and, unlike his buttoned-up “1917”🦋 soldier, frequently shirtless.
“There was more skin,” he says of his many nearly-nude scenes. “[‘1917’] is a uniform — one you wea♉r and in a sense it wears you — where with this there was something so primal and sensual about this world.
“It required you to get down and dirty.”
And he really does. MacKay’s Ned has a bloody fistfight to the death as spectator sport for B🍎ritish aristocrats, he cuts the ear of a man he just killed and, most confusingly for historians, dons aᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ frilly frock while on shooting sprees.
Kelly, who was hanged for his crimes in 1880, was not known for his love of womenswear, but it’s been said that one of Kelly’s gang member♉s, Steve Hart, sometimes wore a dress as a disguise. That defiant rebel attitude fit in perfectly with director Justin Kurzel’s stylized approach.
“They’re young punks,” says MacKay, who adds that Kurzel eveꦛn told the boys to form a band to get into the raucous spirit.
One day during rehearsal, the band-gang met Ben Corbett, the actor playing Ned’s father. Corbett moonlights as a punk musician in the Aꦺustralian swamp rock band Six Ft Hick.
“The first day we met him, Justi🦩n said, ‘Boys,ও you play the loudest song you got, and Ben, will you dance for them?’ ”
The game Corbett began jumping and writhing as the Kelly-gang band played louder and louder. “George, shirt off! Y🌄ou dance with him,” the director yelled. And the two me🧔n, playing father and son, began wrestling on the floor.
Says MacKay: “That’s the tone of the film.”
At home during lockdown, life is far more subdued with his family — mum, dad and sister — inᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ London. But MacKay still can’t quite shake the life of crime.
“I’ve just started watching ‘The Wire,’ ” he says. “And I’ve just finisꩲhed the HBO documentary series ‘The 🐲Jinx.’ ”