Alternate Best Actor 2024: George MacKay in The Beast

George MacKay did not receive an Oscar nomination for portraying Louis in The Beast. 

The Beast follows a woman Gabrielle (Lea Seydoux) going through a sci-fi purification process to purge herself of strong emotions that takes her through past lives. 

George MacKay plays the man who is a constant in her past lives, and while technically it is said to be the same character, MacKay plays three characters within the character of Louis. An ideal casting because MacKay is proving himself as an actor with an ability just to fit into any period/role you want to throw him into. Something that becomes abundantly clear when the earliest memories place the two in France in the 1910’s where Gabrielle is a woman married to a doll factory owner, where she comes across Louis. MacKay fashions himself entirely into this role with a natural ease of the Frenchman within a more regal and potentially repressed period. MacKay doesn’t really require for you to buy into this performance you just immediately believe through the confidence of his work. His posture, and controlled line delivery are that of a man of this period, where MacKay naturally manages to bring in the ease within the unease so to speak. In that MacKay indeed presents a man somewhat repressed within this time and place, but within MacKay’s own work he makes it so naturally that at the same time. MacKay’s refined manner just simply is Louis in this segment and is completely convincing as such as a starting point, that one could presume to believe that the film will merely be about this potential, or “could’ve been” affair between Gabrielle and Louis. 

The chemistry between Seydoux and MacKay is critical to this segment because it is the establishment of the two finding the connections through time. The chemistry in this segment specifically presented within the confines per the period and per the situation where Gabrielle is considering having this affair yet is weighed upon by a belief that doing so would create some sort of catastrophe. Seydoux and MacKay are great together in realizing it in this segment as very much the period drama about the real emotions just beneath the veneer of their well tailored clothing. MacKay showed within the lines in their early scenes the quiet degree of potent connection and interest. Something he fashions in just a glance or a moment of more warmth in his words than the expected formalities of their interactions. MacKay with Seydoux finding the ease towards the two finding something within each other, however subtly just within their hearts yet something they won’t quite say. They naturally realize this progression in the moment until it seems they may finally be able to connect beyond the stolen glances, as they begin to touch one another. Where MacKay and Seydoux are great in showing the way the emotions begin to pierce out of each other from the most minute physical touch. A release that isn't just a standard emotional expression, but rather with it that very specific tension of two people who have been holding it in for so long. Unfortunately just as they might be considering this a fire and flood trap them in the factory and the two must try to survive. MacKay is great in showing the immediacy of the situation within his performance, as suddenly he does become the hero seemingly as the gravity of it all comes loose, and the two repressed refinements are naturally dropped as they are faced with death in the most immediate sense. Sadly despite their attempt to escape they both drown. 

The film then jumps to another life and memory as we see Gabrielle now in a model house sitting in Los Angeles meanwhile Louis is something far less glamorous. Although MacKay delivers an entirely new performance and entirely new presence as this version of Louis, now going by Louie, where we open with him making a vlog espousing his incel beliefs where he notes his horrible life tying all his problems into believing women don’t find him attractive. MacKay is amazing because any notion of his previous performance is instantly forgotten as he is wholly convincing in this new performance. A performance he delivers with as much ease, though now he’s as obviously American but no longer in a state of period repressment. Although even this is a reinvention as his physical manner is changed, but not to a normal behavior. Rather it is a completely different kind of tension, that is less of repression of good emotions instead the tension of someone very mentally unstable. MacKay’s delivery in these scenes is extremely disturbing as he brings so much into them. There’s the obvious self-pity mixed within a strange self-aggrandizement, where he mixes in the two through this particularly off-putting delusion of his state of being. But more unnerving however is this eerie conviction about his performance as he expresses his self-defeating and hateful views, that does have a sense of that sorrowfulness, but more so MacKay underlines it with the palpable sense of a hatred behind it all. MacKay brings to life so naturally and chilling these expressions of the man so firmly believing his own twisted and toxic worldview where you sense this isn’t just videos to paint himself a certain way, rather is a genuine horrifying manifesto he is speaking towards the world. 

Despite their extreme differences in this version of time an earthquake ends up bringing the two together again regardless, where their relationship once again has a chasm although this time through their emotional states. Although a connection in each is lonely, however Gabrielle exists within her loneliness in an attempt to reach out to someone as strange as Louie, meanwhile Louie treats his loneliness as something he needs to strangely defend. MacKay is great in the scene where she first speaks to him because he shows the way the fear instantly realizes itself and his specific intensity becomes more panicked as though the fact that his fundamental worldview is being challenged it almost breaks him. And while rejecting her the first time he does seem to reappear to spend time with her, where MacKay’s amazing in a different kind of awkwardness in terms of the relationship with Gabrielle. They do find chemistry again though this time in a different fashion from before, as she reaches out so warmly while MacKay presents this fixation in his mind as though this version of Louis cannot stop thinking about his assumptions that he’s created in his personal philosophy on women that it prevents him from reaching out back to her. MacKay excels in creating this believable brokenness that is the man where you see the demented state of the man as a constant and lost in his mental disturbance. As we see their encounter seemingly not real, as we see an alternate version of afterwards where we get another screed from Louie where he verbalizes both his intense self-doubts along with a horrifying sense of determined hatred. MacKay creates a chilling portrayal of the man finding solace in his broken mind through his anger. 

Within the scheme of this film there isn’t a traditional resolution to this story as it progresses more so into the framing device of the woman going through the strange process of emotional removal. Although that is where we are given MacKay’s briefest performance as the Louis in the future also considering the process along with Gabrielle. This is without a doubt MacKay’s least showy performance though fittingly as he just presents a normal guy, with not long lost love connection to Gabrielle but rather just a natural ease with her fitting to two people who could potentially have a relationship. And so that potential is the shades of the other two relationships, the first which is left as straightforward as described. The second though, with the past lives connection within the idea as Gabrielle in some versions seems to be able to comfort a deranged Louie, but in another where she murders her. MacKay in both versions creates the juxtaposition of perhaps the past Louis within the reaction to her comfort, or just the psychopathic determination to kill what he sees as his self-delusional “tormentor”. All of these ideas to Gabrielle seemingly reject the process to see Louis in her future again. And while it seems like Louis is giving overtures of connection there is a hollowness in MacKay’s eyes and a lack of connection even as she embraces him. Gabrielle realizing too late that he’s gone through the purification himself, ripping out any chance for love, and MacKay’s great in the way he can express affection in the basest sense, perfunctory, artificial, and with any sense of humanity ripped from it. It’s more remarkable because MacKay doesn’t play it as a pure robot, but rather a human where the soul in which to make genuine connections has been eliminated. If this review sounds slightly jumbled it is because the use of MacKay, who is bordering between lead and supporting, is purposefully jumbled in the memories of Gabrielle. What is not jumbled is MacKay’s actual performance. Where he is captivating in all three performances, there’s no second of accepting the new Louis, MacKay is simply the new Louis each time, creating three distinct phases of life, managing to so tangibly be the repressed romantic, the psychotic anti-romantic and then the man where romance isn’t something that even phases him. The parts are separate but all connected through the immense talent of MacKay, which this performance, or performances are a striking testament of.