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Across an ocean, further separated by the different boxes of a Zoom call, writer Jack Thorne and actor David McKenna still make time to compare notes on “Evita” — specifically, the West End revival of the musical that’s coming to Broadway in 2027, questioning whether or not they’ve found a space in New York (yes) and whether or not they’re doing the balcony as part of the staging (probably not).
This might seem like an odd topic of conversation for two people who have spent the past few years enmeshing themselves in the brutal tenderness and tender brutality of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies.” But a love of musical theater has been core to the 13-year-old McKenna’s journey into acting and to the [redacted]-year-old Thorne’s relationship to the story.
In McKenna’s very first audition for the part of Piggy (aka Nicky), shot by his dad on a “grainy” self-tape while on holiday in Tenerife in 2024, McKenna didn’t have to read any sides; but he did have to say who he’d like to be stuck on a tropical island with.
McKenna’s answer: The West End cast of “Les Misérables.” Obviously.
“Just so I could sing my heart out, which is my bag,” McKenna told IndieWire. If forced to choose, McKenna would pick “On My Own” as his favorite song in “Les Mis,” but he loves the whole thing; and it was really McKenna’s appreciation for the whole of who Nicky is as a person that redefined the way Thorne was approaching the character, as soon as he heard McKenna’s take on the lines.
That happened in the basement of a London church, where, now several rounds into the audition process with Nina Gold, Martin Ware, and their casting team, Thorne hovered “as a vaguely creepy man” in the back as different groups of boys traded reading the core parts in the story. “And I remember the first time I saw David, I went, ‘Oh there he is. There he is,’” Thorne told IndieWire. “ That’s exactly what the character should be.”
On any English test, what the character of Piggy should be is overweight with glasses, clever and forward-thinking but not at all charismatic, a classic bully target who hides behind Ralph until, sadly, he no longer can. But the character as McKenna saw him was “a bit of an old Irish granny.” There is a liveliness of spirit, as well as conviction of his own rightness and a determination to make himself heard, to McKenna’s performance that resonated with Thorne in such a way that it directed his refinements to the script.
“The weird thing is there was a sort of handover of authorship. It was the joy that David found almost immediately that I just wrote to,” Thorne said. The “Lord of the Flies” team had been looking for a young actor with great comedic timing and a love of musicals, someone who could have songs just pass through them. But with McKenna, Thorne found even more than that. He found a collaborator who refused to let Piggy be a victim.
“ Nicky became someone who is joyful and enthusiastic and excited, and all those elements David brought to it,” Thorne said. “ We just kept leaning into those elements.”
As if in anticipation of McKenna, Thorne had already written Nicky with a deep love for the comedy of Groucho Marx. It took McKenna a bit of time to get to grips with the classic comedian, watching a few Marx Brothers films and listening to some of the songs that sneak their way into the “Lord of the Flies” scripts. Even now, he’s diplomatic about his first impressions of Marx in a way that has Thorne trying very hard not to smile.
“ Tommy Lawrence, our acting coach, described this in a very good way, but I think [Groucho Marx] is very, like, of his time. So whenever I first watched it, I was like, ‘OK.’ But now I’m obsessed,” McKenna said. “Love him to bits. I still have the two songs on my Spotify, and every now and then, I’ll put my headphones on and sing to them.”
There are only four episodes to the “Lord of the Flies” miniseries. But what’s clear even after just four minutes of talking to McKenna and Thorne is just how much the experience of making the show has stayed with them, and how excited they are to share the things that process inspired them to explore with each other. McKenna and Thorne are as fond of “Hooray for Captain Spaulding” as they are reminiscing about the month of rehearsals the cast had in Kuala Lumpur prior to shooting on a string of very remote islands in Malaysia.
“We were in quite a grotty room in a hotel pretending it was forest, so people were crawling along the floor and rolling around on quite dirty carpet, with a very noisy air conditioning system that would turn on and off, depending on how hot the room got,” Thorne said, punctuated by an enthusiastic McKenna agreeing “Yeah!” throughout. The actor also remembered that Lawrence would play the pig in every relevant scene in rehearsals, even going so far as to leap up onto the table. “That guy’s a legend,” McKenna said.
The two scenes that were finessed the most, where McKenna’s interpretation of Nicky was most crucial, were his first meeting with Ralph (Winston Sawyers) and his Episode 1 confrontation with Jack (Lox Pratt). “Finding the right temperature in those moments was a really complicated thing, and the actors were amazing in how they worked with [director Marc Munden] and Tommy right up to that moment of filming,” Thorne said. “It was fascinating how they found different things when filming actually happened.”
But that was in no small part because the rehearsal process allowed the show’s cast to work out rules of engagement and get comfortable with one another. Deep engagement with the text and understanding character intention really helps — “It’s really, really mean, what he says. And then it’s that moment of saying something he regrets and can’t take back,” McKenna said about the confrontation with Jack. But also, so does spending time in the hotel pool.
Specifically, a pool game called “Save David” that sprang up organically when the cast was released from rehearsals.
“ I can’t even compare it to anything else. But basically, there were nine of us, so you’d pick a group who’d be, like, the police, and another group would be the robbers, and one group would have to get me on their shoulders and carry me to the other side, and the other group would try and grab me and stop me. And if you got me to the end of the pool, you won the game,” McKenna said. “I loved it. I got carried about everywhere.”
“Save David” is probably not what most actors think about when they talk about being “held” by their scene partners. But it did really help the camaraderie among the cast and was the kind of thing that would, invisibly, feed into their performances. The poignancy of “Lord of the Flies” is that these boys are very much still boys. Moments of play and chaos and curiosity peak through even as they’re struggling to control a growing darkness within themselves.
That’s the difference that Thorne sees between “Lord of the Flies” and “Adolescence,” the other four-part miniseries he’s recently written, about how Not OK young men can be. “I’d started ‘Lord of the Flies’ before I started ‘Adolescence,’ but they were written at the same time, and they were filmed in the same summer. So there are definitely ways in which they speak to each other that are more spiritual than anything else, in my head. Both are looking at the ways in which boys spiral and the dangers of that spiral and the wisdom you need to listen to outside of that spiral,” Thorne said. “But 13 and 14 are very different from 10, 11, and 12, and Jamie [from ‘Adolescence’] wouldn’t belong on that island.”
One other similarity between the projects is the sense that not only do people like Jamie (Owen Cooper) and Jack get lost, but truly anyone can get lost enough to harm and kill other people, and — especially in the case of “Lord of the Flies” — there’s no one simple, single thing that goes wrong. “It’s about a series of micro-decisions which just go slightly wrong. And it’s not all Jack making those wrong decisions. Ralph and Piggy are both capable of being part of wrong decision-making, and they are,” Thorne said.
However, the things that can lead to faults are, in a twisted way, something McKenna loves about the character. “He’s gonna make himself heard. He knows what’s right and even if people try to squash him down, he’s still gonna make himself heard. He’s not just gonna stand in the back. He will push to the front,” McKenna said.
Even in Nicky’s darkest moments, that enthusiasm served McKenna well. He thought doing a death scene was “brilliant,” and was excited to share that he got to do it twice — the series shot the rock that cracks his skull and shatters the conch in September, and then the “long death” where Piggy gets to say one more line of Groucho Marx’s before he loses consciousness in December.
“By that time, Winston and I had a bond because we’d done this whole experience by then. It was great because they kept the whole set very quiet because it was a really intimate scene between the two of us,” McKenna said. “And I got my hair washed afterwards. It was great. I’d lift up my hair and, because the blood was all over me and we were in the heat, so the blood would stick to my hair. It was pretty grim, but it was pretty fun.”
“That scene went through a whole journey in the edit because there was one version of it which was incredibly gruesome where you were really with Piggy and that was a little too much. We had to pull it back. But I love what those two boys do in that scene. I think they’re just beautiful together,” Thorne said.
If nothing else, the legacy of “Lord of the Flies” will be just how well this team complemented each other and elevated each other’s work. McKenna is still in a group chat with his castmates and thinks it’s incredibly special how they’ve gotten to have this experience no one else will have. But he would certainly be game to have even more experiences collaborating with Thorne, and working to illuminate interesting characters together. Thorne agrees.
“You won’t know this, I don’t think, David, but there’s a group of books by Susan Cooper called ‘The Dark Is Rising’ which I think could be amazing and I could see David being incredible in the lead,” Thorne said. But then the writer changed his mind and opted for territory that both he and McKenna already love.
“‘Evita.’ Let’s just do ‘Evita,’” Thorne said. “It’s time.”
“Absolutely, let’s do it. I’m up for it,” McKenna said. “I’ll shove Madonna out of the way, and I’ll do it.”
Working with Thorne, it certainly seems like McKenna can do all of it.
“Lord of the Flies” is available on Netflix.
