Sunday, December 19, 2021

Mackenzie Davis Wakes From a Fever Dream

If it were really, truly the end of the world, and Mackenzie Davis knew it, she'd be in Canada. Just north of Vancouver, to be precise—her childhood home. If Earth were about to burn, Davis would prefer it be summertime, because then she could steer her father's wooden boat out into the waters of Desolation Sound, a popular sailing spot off the Salish Sea. There, the light streams out from behind the mountains in the distance, turning the coast a cool violet. With all her friends and family piled into her dad's old boat—this is fantasy, after all, there'd be enough room—they'd fish for prawns in the morning and behead them in the afternoon, with Davis dipping her long, muscular body between the rocks, coming up for air with armfuls of oysters. This would be, Davis says, the happiest apocalypse she can imagine.

Lately, the 34-year-old actress has spent a lot of time thinking about endings. That's not to say she's a particularly morbid person. In fact, she's often quick-witted, even wry; our first exchange is over a dirty joke I've declined to share here. But a couple of years like 2020 and 2021 demand a real honesty about the nature of life and death. "Everything changed," Davis tells me, as we lounge in a perfect pandemic-era tableau, both of us unmasked but carefully contained within a tiny room at her publicist's offices in Manhattan. "We're just pretending that it's fine because we can go out for dinner again."

It's not fine, actually, and Davis knows this, though she hesitates with how to articulate it.

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