Just five years into her career, Mackenzie Foy has starred opposite werewolves and vampires, Oscar winners and living legends, and all before her 14th birthday. But it was only recently that she learned to actually enjoy watching herself on-screen.
“Anne told me not to judge myself so hard when I see movies, and to see it as myself progressing,” Foy told us, referring to her Interstellar co-star Anne Hathaway, herself a former child actress. “Which is incredible advice, and she’s such an amazing person. I just love her so much.”
Plenty of 13-year-old girls gush like this about their friends, but Foy gets to be pal around with movie stars; since landing the big role of Edward and Bella’s daughter Renesmee in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Foy has been well on her way to becoming a movie star herself. In Interstellar she plays Murph, the brainy and stubborn daughter of Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper, a former NASA pilot forced to become a farmer when, not so far in the distant future, the world all but runs out of food. Murph grows up on a farm but with a father who dreams of doing more, and she’s heartbroken when her dad signs up for a secret NASA mission to explore new worlds and, hopefully, find one to colonize.
Later in the film Murph is played by Jessica Chastain, and though Foy admits she’d never seen one of Chastain’s movies (most of them are rated R, anyway), the two actresses met before filming to help create the character. “Just little things that we do with our hands, facial expressions,” she says of their settled upon traits, “with like the pencil [behind the ear], always having a messy bun.”
Other than having to go to school and take the occasional math test, Foy, often the only minor on set, says she wasn’t treated any differently than her adult cast mates. “They’re just people, so I talk to them,” she says. The only other kids around included costar Timothée Chalamet, who plays her brother Tom, and sometimes director Christopher Nolan’s children. “I love hanging around them,” Foy says, remembering digging for frogs with Nolan’s kids between takes on the Alberta set.
Foy swears she’s never been starstruck, but admits that if anyone could do it, it would be Benedict Cumberbatch: “I’m a huge Cumberbatch fan, so I’d probably get pretty excited.” Other than (we assume) snagging a guest spot on Sherlock, Foy says her next goal is a film role that allows her to do her own stunts—she’s a first-degree black belt in tae kwon do, and not unlike her co-star Chastain, she’s got action on the brain. “I am dying to do an action movie," she says. "I can do my own stunts, I can do this.”
Foy can be seen stealing all of her scenes in Interstellar, now in theaters everywhere.
