Actress Danielle Macdonald Talks ‘Losing Her Mind a Bit’ in ‘The Tourist’ Season Two and More

When diving into the second season of her Netflix show, “The Tourist,” it took Danielle Macdonald nearly the whole first month to feel like she was back in the same character.

“The first month I was only working with people I was just meeting for the first time. And I was like, ‘This is so weird — trying to play the same character when everything is different,’” Macdonald says.

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“I’ve never brought a character back. I’ve only ever done film or miniseries, and this was obviously meant to be that, but bringing a character back was a whole strange sensation,” she adds.

It wasn’t until her costar, Jamie Dornan, arrived on the Dublin set that things began to feel normal again.

“We filmed and we were like, ‘Oh, there it is,’” she says.

The Australian actress, who has lived in Los Angeles for almost 14 years now, broke out in the 2017 Sundance hit “Patti Cake$,” in which she played an aspiring rapper, before going on to projects like the “Dumplin,’” which costarred Jennifer Aniston, and now the drama-thriller “The Tourist.” The show follows Dornan as “The Man,” a car crash survivor who wakes up in an Australian hospital with amnesia, and must try to piece together his past as it catches up with him.

“I kind of love how wild and wacky and weird it is, and how you never know what’s going to happen next. It really managed to surprise me constantly,” says the 32 year-old, who plays Helen, a local who works with Dornan’s character to figure out who he is.

“With season one, I read the first four episodes in one sitting and I was like, ‘I need to know what happens.’ And I remember telling the writers when I met them on Zoom, ‘Look, if you don’t want to give me the job, that’s fine, but you need to tell me what happened,’” she says.

While her character Helen is a “moral standard” in the first season, season two sees her “losing her mind a bit — which was really fun,” Macdonald says.

“It’s not always simple and easy. Sometimes people go through really hard things and they don’t necessarily act the way they would normally. So it was fun getting to explore that side,” she says.

Macdonald admits to not being the most online person, but is thrilled when people want to chat with her about the show in real life.

“It’s always exciting when people apologize for coming to say hello to you. I’m like, ‘No, I am so happy you’re watching the show. That’s a gift to us,’” she says. “We make it for people to watch it. It just means someone liked what you did. That’s always a nice thing.”

Up next, Macdonald will be seen in the screen adaptation of the Liane Moriarty book “The Last Anniversary,” produced by and starring Nicole Kidman, as well as Teresa Palmer and Miranda Richardson.

“It’s a very female-oriented, big ensemble cast, with a lot of quirky Australian humor, which is great because it’s what I grew up with,” she says of the miniseries. “I read the scripts and I was like, ‘Oh, I grew up watching these with my family.’”

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