1. Cooking For Friends
Mackie loves nothing better than cooking for friends and family. “Food really is my happy place,” she says. “Ask anyone I know, they’ll say a) I’m always hungry, and b) I’m very disappointed if food is not good. Because I feel like life is too short. And I don’t mean it always needs to be super bougie; it’s not even about that. But if it’s exactly what you want at the right time, there’s nothing better. At home, growing up, it was me and my mum. She was veggie for most of my life and that meant so was I for the first 12 years, I think. There was a lot of pasta: that’s my mum’s one dish. I don’t feel I’m offending her by saying that. She was a single mum, she worked hard. Cooking didn’t bring her joy. Whereas I love cooking; it genuinely brings me so much joy.”
2. Shellfish and Tacos
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Mackie loves shellfish, but thinks she became allergic after going overboard with it. “We used to go to friends in the south of France in the summer,” she says. “I’d get really very excited by the massive prawns when you went to the beach. And I feel like I’ve eaten so many of them that that’s how I became allergic to them. My body just went: “You’ve had your fill, you need to leave some for someone else.” Because when I was 21, I became really quite severely allergic to shellfish, which is still very sad for me to this day. Me and my fiancee love Mexican food, so for our engagement party we were like: ‘We’ve got to make tacos!’ So my fiancee borrowed a taco press and we had handmade corn tortillas with pulled pork and sweet potato for 100 people. We had all our neighbors squeezing limes. It was crazy, but actually it was delicious.”
3. People Watching
Mackie is interested in what makes other people tick, which is why she ended up acting. “I have always been fascinated by other people,” she says. “I’ll walk down the road and look at people, and think: I wonder what it’s like to be them. We are all given a very different set of opportunities and circumstances, and within those constraints we are trying to carve out our lives in the best way we can. It’s fantastic. You get to pretend to be somebody else! And as I’ve got older, I’ve realized that it can also be an incredible way to bring light to issues, and stories, that aren’t necessarily told that much. It allows people to understand things on a more personal level.”
4. Diversity On Screen
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Mackie is proud to have fans dress up as her. “When I was little there weren’t that many people who looked like me on TV, so it’s great to have two little kids thinking: ‘OK, she looks like me so I’m going to dress up as her, and I don’t need a different kind of face make-up, I don’t need to straighten my hair,’” she says. “When Alicia Keys came out that was a big thing for me because she was mixed race as well. There were a lot of people I liked on screen, like Judi Dench, she’s wicked, but that’s very different to having someone where you think, ‘She looks like me, maybe I could do that.’”
5. Family First
Alysse is happiest when surrounded by friends and family. “I hope our family will be a household where there’s always food on the table, however many friends our kids bring home,” she says. “I love nothing more than cramming too many people around the table and figuring out how to feed them: ‘I don’t know how we’re going to do this, but let’s do it!’ To me, that’s what food is. That’s what it does.”
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