Charlie Mackesy is giggling sweetly down the phone while doing an uncannily good impression of Gabriel Byrne. The Dubliner was his first choice to play the horse in Mackesy’s upcoming animated film of his hopeful, comforting and genre-bending graphic novel, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.
“I love Gabriel and I love his voice,” Mackesy explains. “My dad was Irish. I loved the Irish relationship with horses and always felt the horse should be Irish.”
An online sensation that went on to become a publishing phenomenon, the book has sold eight million copies around the world, including nearly 150,000 in Ireland, making it the bestselling book here for two years in a row. His new book, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse: The Animated Story is another gorgeous hardback telling the story of the 30-minute animated film, starring the voices of Byrne, Idris Elba and Tom Hollander, which will be first aired on Christmas Day.
Initially, the film-making team struggled to reach Byrne through official channels. Mackesy managed to track down the actor’s address in Maine, in the United States, and sent him a handwritten letter, using the same distinctive ink he uses in his drawings, asking him to take part. Mackesy put his mobile number at the bottom.
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“My phone rang two weeks later with a foreign number and it was Gabriel. I asked him if he fancied playing the horse in the movie.” And Gabriel said: “Charlie, I am the f**kin’ horse.”
“I laughed and I cried and said thank you. It was spectacular working with him, even over Zoom. I am hoping I get to have a pint of Guinness with him some day.”
I ask Mackesy to describe his current surroundings. He is sitting, he says, looking out at a snowy London with a freshly made cup of tea. His home and artist’s studio in Brixton is a sort of “time capsule” of his life, filled with thousands of drawings from over the decades. He confesses he slept it out that morning despite a day packed with radio interviews and, in a rush to get ready, stepped barefoot into a pool of “dog pee” belonging to his daschund, Barney. His studio is strewn with dirty teacups and ink pots and a huge cardboard cut out of the boy and the fox, two of the stars of his beloved book which was published to acclaim in October 2019, touching an even deeper chord during the pandemic.
It all began when the former book illustrator and Spectator cartoonist posted one of his drawings on Instagram after a conversation about bravery with his friend adventurer Bear Grylls. He paired the resulting drawing with the words: “What is the bravest thing you’ve ever said?” asked the boy. “Help,” said the horse. He started getting emails from people in all over the world and from people in the military asking if they could use it in their PTSD units or therapy clinics. He started to wonder what else the boy might ask and what his characters would answer to help people make sense of the world.
Mackesy has explained that all four characters in the book represent different parts of the same person: a curious boy, a cake-obsessed mole, a cagey and hurt fox and a wise horse of few words sharing their fears and discoveries about vulnerability, kindness, hope, friendship and love. The countryside is key to Mackesy’s work. He grew up among “jolly, kind people”, the sheep farmers of England’s rural Northumberland. His father, with roots in Wicklow, was a naval architect and his mother was creative too, a green-fingered woman and expert seamstress. Life was largely idyllic and outdoorsy before he was sent to boarding school at seven. He is keen to stress that his parents had the best intentions for his education, but he was homesick and unhappy at being sent away.
“The separation at seven was really tough and there’s a part of me that still feels that,” he says. “I remember going into my own world at the time, writing songs for a kestrel I’d made up in my head, I used to imagine I was back home in the woods with my dog. It propelled me into my imagination as a way of surviving. As a boy I was wondering a lot about why we do things the way we do. In lessons I’d say ‘this is all very interesting but why are we doing this in the first place? What’s the point of any of this?’ We were learning about potassium permanganate turning blue and I was asking ‘why aren’t we talking about things that really matter?”
I tell him I have a daughter who asks similar questions about maths and that I struggle to know what to say and sometimes get cross. “They are important but difficult questions to answer. [My teachers] used to say ‘well because your parents want you to’… or ‘so you can pass exams and get a job and be a success’. I remember thinking ‘what do you mean by success?’ Growing up, the farmers seem to have life sussed. They didn’t worry about money, they had a good routine, they drank cups of tea…”
He missed that way of life terribly so one summer, aged 16, he walked eight miles to another town, at one point wading through a river, and went into the staff room of the local state school asking the bemused teachers whether he could enroll there instead. They said yes. This one scene from his childhood is enough to make you wish Mackesy might one day create a graphic novel of his own life and times. He is open about his experiences. He has lost close friends and experienced mental health issues and was once driven by grief and despair to do a spot of streaking at a horse race meeting. His artistic life, once it began, provided the sort of solace his book has given to millions of readers. That career began on the streets of London, drawing houses and other buildings and took him to galleries in the United States and Africa. “I have never had a plan,” he says, convincingly.
After the unexpected success of his book – he had help “sewing” it together from Cork man Colm Roche – the animated film felt inevitable. He had always tried to imagine how his characters would move. “Sometimes I’d be in bed and see them walking across the ceiling to music… during lockdown we had so many offers to make a film and we ended up making it ourselves.” Why a movie? “You know, not everybody reads books and we felt it would be very interesting to see if we could create, in a film, the same kind of feeling the book has created. If you have an opportunity like that, it’d be silly not to try.”
He turned 60 earlier this month. “Such a strange feeling because inside I feel like I am 22,” he laughs. There was no lavish party, just some snowball fights with friends in the English countryside and hiding a few books for passersby to find. He says his book began with conversations with friends over WhatsApp, some of who were struggling. He wanted to help them with his drawings.
This motivation has not changed despite his success. He keeps a file with every letter that has been sent to him from people who were positively moved or changed and in some cases saved by his words and pictures. He’s heard many stories of people who were close to suicide and who changed their minds because of a drawing or a sentence in his book.
When I ask how the money has changed him or his life he says: “What has moved me most is that the book has helped people at sometimes the worst moments of their lives. I don’t think you get to the end of your life and on a gravestone you see someone’s bank account. It’s not important or remotely interesting… I’ve been able to be more generous than ever before and there are things we can do with material success but it’s not why I did it.”
During lockdown, as the book sales snowballed, he retreated to a barn deep into the Suffolk countryside where he helped care for his nonagenarian mother. When I ask what’s next for him, he doesn’t talk about books or movies but about spending time with his “brilliant” sister who still cares full time for his mother. Over Christmas, the family will watch his animated film together, with their dogs and many cups of tea.
A conversation with Mackesy feels special, that singular pleasure of encountering a particularly sensitive, wise, mischievous and gentle soul. When we’re saying goodbye, he generously leaves me with this little Mackesyian jewel: “Don’t get cross with your daughter… tell her that her questions are good and that you don’t know the answers. Tell her to live in the question and that if she lives in the question, it will be answered one day, probably in the most unexpected way.”
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is on BBC Two on Christmas Eve at 4.55pm. It is preceded, at 3.55pm, by Charlie Mackesy: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and Me
