FUTURE FINDER 2020 HIT LIST
AN education
you only have to look at the success of Booksmart and Euphoria to see that the new wave of high-school stories is changing the genre for the better. Sex Education, another runaway hit, returns to Netflix for season two this January. When it first aired in February last year, most of its young cast were newcomers, including Emma Mackey, who plays the pink-haired, kohl-addicted Maeve. Along with Asa Butterfield’s Otis, they form an endearing and entrepreneurial pairing that teams up to offer sex and relationship advice to their classmates — at a price. Their unwitting source? Otis’ sex-therapist mum, the liberal Jean, played by the inimitable Gillian Anderson. “[Anderson] doesn’t really walk — she kind of floats,” gushes Mackey. “If she wasn’t so nice, it would be really infuriating.”
“I DON’T CARE ABOUT BEING A LEAD – AS LONG AS THE FEMALE CHARACTER IS DRIVING HER OWN STORY AND ISN’T JUST A SATELLITE”
The actor, whose father is French and mother is English, grew up in a “dainty little French town” in Le Mans, in the country’s northwest, before leaving home at 17 to study at the University Of Leeds in the UK. On most actors’ IMDb pages there are usually a few relatively unheard-of projects — a seemingly random mix of small-time indies and TV bit-parts — before the “big one” in which they’ve made a name for themselves. On Mackey’s profile, there’s only one. A serious feat.
Just a few years ago, Mackey had resorted to working as a live-in nanny just so she’d have somewhere to stay. She’d been knocked back from drama school but was going to acting classes, and within six months of finding an agent, she landed Sex Education. These days, it’s not unusual to see Gigi Hadid comment on her Instagram posts (she recently wrote “Yay!” on a season two announcement post of Mackey’s).
“I’m still quite new — this is my second year
