The Screenwriter of ‘Poor Things’ Flunked English Class — Now, Tony McNamara Is Hollywood’s Hottest Scribe

Tony McNamara was a voracious reader as a kid growing up in a rural town outside Melbourne, Australia. But he never once considered becoming a writer. “I was always failing English,” he says. “I couldn’t get my head around grammar. Still can’t.”

And yet today, McNamara, 56, is the Oscar-nominated screenwriter behind some of the most sharp-witted, intricately verbal projects of the past five years, including 2018’s “The Favourite,” for director Yorgos Lanthimos; the 2020 Hulu series “The Great,” with Elle Fanning; and 2021’s “Cruella,” starring Emma Stone. Most recently, McNamara reunited with Lanthimos and Stone for “Poor Things,” which premiered at the Venice Film Festival to a rapturous reception and opened in limited release on Dec. 8. It tells the fantastical story of Bella Baxter (Stone), a Victorian woman transplanted with an infant’s brain who launches on an odyssey of sexual and intellectual self-discovery.

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The common thread in all of these projects is McNamara’s keen ear for heightened, acid-tipped repartee that’s also, somehow, emotionally revealing — honed over years spent as a day student at a boarding school in his hometown. “It was this ‘Lord of the Flies’ verbal kind of school,” he says with a wry chuckle. “The whole point was emotional destruction — like, how do we destroy each other emotionally through words?”

But because McNamara was, as he puts it, “so savagely untalented” in his English classes, he turned instead to numbers as a profession, working as a “foreign exchange trader’s lackey” in Australia and then in London in his early 20s. “I was very conscious of how much hypocrisy and lying and skirting the edges of the law was going on,” he says. “And, I mean, I was terrible at it. It’s not just that I didn’t like it. I was completely incompetent — which means I probably could have stayed and run Lehman Brothers into the ground.”

Feeling lost, McNamara wound up “wandering around Europe” and eventually landed in Rome, where he spent a couple weeks not talking to anyone and jotting away his thoughts in his journal. He began thinking about all the thrilling theater he was seeing in London — David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Edward Albee — and how much the language of the plays “really lit me up.” He realized that he desperately wanted to create that kind of feeling himself. He wanted to be a writer.

“It wasn’t even like, ‘That’s what I’m going to do,’” he says. “It was more like, ‘That’s what you are.’”

Through the 1990s and 2000s, McNamara began building a robust career in Australia as a playwright and TV writer, and he made his feature debut as a writer-director in 2003 with the coming-of-age film “The Rage in Placid Lake” starring Rose Byrne and Ben Lee. Virtually all of his output focused on contemporary characters in more-or-less recognizable scenarios, and by the late 2000s, he felt creatively stuck.

“I think I was just a bit bored with myself, for want of a better word,” he says. “I was looking for another canvas or something to stretch me in a different way.”

That led McNamara to write “The Great” as a play — a biographical comedy about the Empress Catherine of Russia with a rather liberated approach to history — which McNamara eventually adapted into his series for Hulu. The pilot script for the show made its way to Lanthimos, who was starting to work on his own skewed account of Queen Anne of Great Britain and her intimate relationships with two rival women in the early 18th century.

The two first met over a video call in 2014. After talking for just 15 minutes, the filmmaker hired McNamara to write what became 2018’s “The Favourite” — which earned 10 Oscar nominations, including for best picture, director and original screenplay, and won Olivia Colman the Oscar for best actress.

When asked what he said in such a short time to win over Lanthimos, McNamara shrugs. “Our sensibility clicks,” he says. “We knew we wanted it to be different. I mean, you’re getting a Greek and an Australian to make an English period movie. It’s not going to be normal.”

But when the director engaged McNamara to tackle “Poor Things” — based on a novel by Alasdair Gray that Lanthimos had been looking to adapt for several years — his ambitions for the production were daunting in the extreme.

“It’s so many things,” McNamara says. “It’s a satire, it’s a comedy, it’s a coming-of-age movie, it’s a Frankenstein movie, it’s a philosophical movie. It was so many genres to pull together. I don’t think he knew and I don’t think I knew whether it would work.”

Lanthimos sent the screenwriter some references for inspiration, like Federico Fellini’s “And the Ship Sails On” and “a couple of ’70s French movies that had that slightly not-real-world vibe,” McNamara says. “Never to be taken literally. He always says, ‘But also, just do it like us.’”

In that vein, McNamara took particular care with tracking Bella’s mental development through the evolution of her language, which transforms from barely verbal to dazzlingly complex over the course of the film. “It had to be grounded enough that the fantasy world around it didn’t sort of float off,” he says. “I wanted to make sure that sometimes she walked into an experience with no foreknowledge and just made up words for that experience. Like sex was ‘furious jumping.’”

Sex has indeed been a recurring subject of McNamara’s work. In “The Great,” Fanning’s Catherine uses it both for her own pleasure and for political gamesmanship with her husband, Peter (Nicholas Hoult). In “Poor Things,” Bella’s ability to live without shame or embarrassment affords her an almost miraculous freedom to explore her sexuality.

McNamara, however, frowns a bit when asked how he approaches writing sex scenes. “My philosophy of it is always, there’s no such thing as a sex scene,” he says. “To me, there’s a character beat, and there’s a story beat, and there’s an emotional beat, and they happen to be having sex to have that beat. I hate sex scenes for no reason. I just really home in on: What do they want? And if [sex] is an aspect of their journey to get to the end of the story, then the truth of the story has to be told.”

Writing the action of those scenes presents a different challenge for McNamara, who has never quite shaken his childhood difficulty with grammar and syntax. “It’s some slight miswiring,” he says. “The difference between prose and dialogue is so vast to me that they’re like two different languages. When I write scene description, my assistant or my wife has to kind of untangle it. For a long time, it troubled me greatly. But now, that’s what I am.”

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