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EXCLUSIVE: Thomasin McKenzie says that because of her youthful appearance — she’s 24 — it has been “a bit of a struggle” to play her own age or older, but those worries are banished with her latest role. In the wonderful movie Joy, she delivers a remarkable portrait of Jean Purdy, one of the founding pioneers of human in vitro fertilization therapy, commonly known as IVF.
If gynecologist Dr. Patrick Steptoe and physiologist Robert Edwards are regarded as the “fathers” of IVF, then Purdy, a nurse and embryologist, is its godmother.
It’s a spot-on perfect part for the New Zealander who starred in Jojo Rabbit, Last Night in Soho and The Power of the Dog, and she shines brilliantly as Purdy alongside Bill Nighy as Steptoe and James Norton as Edwards, who later was knighted for his services to medical research.
Joy has its would premiere screening at the BFI London Film Festival on Tuesday at the Southbank Centre, with screenings also on Wednesday and Saturday. Joy will have a theatrical release on November 15, and it will arrive on Netflix globally on November 22. The film arrives at a time when reproduction rights are being fiercely debated in the United States and elsewhere.
McKenzie laughs when she says she that she was quite nervous about doing the film directed by Ben Taylor (Sex Education) because “it was the oldest I’ve played.”
Joy spans 10 years, “and I’m quite a young-appearing person, I always have been,” she explains. “And so its been a bit of a struggle for me to play my age or older, and I’ve been trying to make that transition from teenage roles to young-adult roles. And so this for me was that transition.”
And, quite rightly, she was treated as an adult on set as well.
On some prior productions, she had definitely “felt” that her suggestions weren’t always welcome, ”but that wasn’t the case on this film.”
There’s a line that McKenzie wanted to add for a scene where 23-year-old Purdy meets Edwards for the first time at Cambridge University, where she had applied for the post of research assistant in the department of physiology.
“Jean says, ‘These are my qualifications, this is where I’ve studied.’ It’s just a short line, but it wasn’t there before, and I felt it needed to be in to let the audience know that she’s not just randomly showing up, she was working,” McKenzie says.
She praises Taylor for setting a high bar for civility and kindness: Every soul on the movie behaved likewise, she says, from Jack Thorne and Rachel Mason and producers Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey to close cast friend Tanya Moodie and all other cast, creatives and crew.
That attitude made her feel confident enough to suggest making it clear to audiences that Purdy was “fully qualified to be there.”
Taylor, along with Mason and Thorne — who are partners — have personal ties to IVF ”and were so deep into the story,” says McKenzie.
The film puts Jean Purdy center stage, something that history has been slow to do.
Purdy ’s participation in bringing about the pioneering conception that led to the first “test tube” baby, Louise Brown, being born on July 25, 1978, often was overlooked while her two fellow trailblazers were garlanded by their scientific peers.
There had been tremendous pushback from the general public and medical community when they were trying to make IVF happen, but once the procedure was successful, their peers, at least, applauded Steptoe and Edwards. “They received acclaim and congratulations and plaques, and at the time they wanted Jean to be included in those congratulations. But the scientific community wouldn’t allow her to be part of that because she was a woman.”
McKenzie, who studied reams of material for the role, suggests that if “Edwards hadn’t have selected Jean to go on that journey with him and Steptoe, I truly believe it would have taken them a lot longer to find the success in IVF because Jean really is the person who brought it all together.“ And there’s a lot of biographical and scientific background information to support Mackenzie’s theory.
Fittingly, however, Edwards announced at a lecture on the 20th anniversary of clinical IVF: ”There were three original pioneers in IVF, not just two.”
Some, nonetheless, wondered why Edwards was the sole recipient of the 2010 Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of reproductive medicine. For starters: The Noble Prize is not awarded posthumously, which sadly, made Purdy and Steptoe ineligible.
However, it’s striking that while Edwards’ Nobel Prize citation made reference to Steptoe’s contribution, the document has zero mention of Purdy.
Yet, she was often the sole woman attending lectures where men were addressing other men about Fallopian tubes, how eggs mature and about how the female reproductive system in general works. That is why McKenzie and director Taylor talked a lot “about wanting to see Jean as an equal” and not portray her as being a helping hand to Steptoe and Edwards, instead she was “key to it all.”
Once when Purdy took time off to care for her mother, nothing happened for months in the lab at Oldham Cottage Hospital in Greater Manchester.
Also, she was the one who suggested the lab try using the women’s natural cycles. “She was the one who figured it out,” says McKenzie.
The repercussions from those who vehemently disapproved were cruel. Some accused the three innovators of doing the “work of the devil.”
Purdy’s mother Gladys (a superb Joanna Scanlan) makes that same point abundantly clear to her daughter.
Like her mother, Purdy was a very religious person. A nurse she studied with in the mid-1960s remembers her fondly, calling her a “lovely Christian woman,” so it was tough for Purdy to do a job that ostracized her from those she loved most.
“She had so much courage because she was a very religious person,” and a big responsibility for her was taking care of her mother, so she had to make “massive sacrifices doing the work that she did,” McKenzie laments.
She was excluded from her community at church. She received death threats and hate mail. Her mum wouldn’t talk to her, and she had no other family. “So, yeah, that took a lot of courage for Jean,” McKenzie says.
McKenzie sees Purdy as someone who has “so much love and so much to give, but she doesn’t allow herself to receive that love.”
McKenzie says with intensity in her voice, “But there has always been so much pressure on women, and there’s always been so much pressure on women to be mothers. Historically, the female role in society is to reproduce and to marry and to play that role, and Jean felt she wasn’t able to do that, and so she wouldn’t let herself be loved.”
McKenzie finds that heartbreaking, and one feels the same watching the film. It’s so deeply moving that because of the work that Purdy did, countless women have been able to start a family. “She made a huge, huge impact on the world and allowed millions of people to have children that they loved deeply.”
The three main stars put in some serous hours to prepare. They visited London’s Guys Hospital and were allowed into the gynecological unit “to talk to the nurses, the people working in IVF behind the scenes.” They also were able to look at the incubators “that had embryos in them and they were tracking whether those embryos were growing or not, whether the cells were multiplying, which was incredible.”
They had an embryologist on set who would advise them on all the scientific scenes. “They were very rigorous about it,” McKenzie murmurs. “It was stressful because I didn’t want to look like an idiot.”
The actor had help closer to home back in Wellington, New Zealand, where, when younger, she used to babysit three children whose grandfather, Dr. Richard Fisher, is a leader and pioneer of fertility in the South Pacific country.
That family, coincidentally, moved to London and happen to live near McKenzie, who moved here a year ago. “Before we started filming, we talked abut IVF and Dr. Fisher’s experience bringing IVF to New Zealand and everything about the protests and picketing, and he gave us so many valuable pieces of information that was so valuable for filming.”
I seek permission from her to ask whether any close family have had a relationship with IVF.
She shakes her head and says that “no one in my family has had IVF.”
A moment later, McKenzie volunteers: ”I mean, I hope that I’m pretty fertile!”
She adds: ”This is a weird thing to say, but my mum had my little sister when she was 44, and my grandma had my mum really late, so I think I come from a very fertile family.”
McKenzie, however, discloses that when she was younger, there was a health situation for a little while, long resolved, where she was “fearful that I may not be able to have children.”
For that reason, McKenzie was able, she says, to feel “very connected to Jean” because of “that fear and the societal pressure that all women feel.”
Making the film was such an important education for her “on how things work inside of me,” and she was surprised about the things she didn’t know.
Actually, she was shocked by what she didn’t know. “We need to be talking about these things because if we don’t know about these — I mean, this is about birth; this is how the world keeps on going, how generations keep moving.”
Another film she’s working on is The Woman Clothed by The Sun directed by Mona Fastvold. It’s about the origin of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, better known as the Shakers.
She’s currently preparing to shoot Fackham Hall for director Jim O’Hanlon. I beg her forgiveness for mispronouncing the film’s title.
Smiling brightly, McKenzie elucidates. “But the joke is, it’s supposed to sound like that.”
From what I can ascertain, McKenzie plays the daughter of a titled aristocrat played by Katherine Waterston.
I first met Thomasin McKenzie in 2018, when she attended Cannes for the Directors’ Fortnight premiere of Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, and was struck by the level-headedness she displayed at 17.
Older now, she’s just as down to earth, and I like that she doesn’t seek to visit attention-grabbing West End restaurants and overhyped nightclubs. She’d rather go with her cousins and uncle from Wellington to watch Arsenal play or out for fun adventures with her boyfriend and other friends.
“Maybe something to do with coming from New Zealand,” she explains.
Then a tiny beat later, she whispers: “To be honest, I don’t know where those restaurants are. They’re just not my haunts.”
Can’t resist saying that McKenzie radiates joy!
