Hard Sun’s Jojo Macari takes a stab

JOJO MACARI IN LONDON, JANUARY 2018. COAT: VIVIENNE WESTWOOD. SHIRT: JOHN LAWRENCE SULLIVAN. PANTS: ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA COUTURE. SHOES: PAUL SMITH. SOCKS: PANTHERELLA. RING: ALAN CROCETTI. STYLING: KAREN CLARKSON. GROOMING: NATALIE SHAFII USING R+CO. SPECIAL THANKS: EUROART STUDIOS.

“You have to break the skin in two actions,” says Jojo Macari, as he demonstrates with his right hand the proper way to stab another human being. The 21-year-old actor was taught to knife fight in preparation for a particularly brutal scene opposite Agyness Deyn, who plays his mother in Hard Sun, Hulu’s hellish new thriller about two detectives who track down a flash drive containing government secrets about the impending apocalypse. The scene was shot over three days, and Deyn pulled no punches—or kitchenware. “I was actually hit in the head with a kettle and stabbed in the face with a fork about five times,” he says. “It was good fun!” Macari has been such a natural as the deeply disturbed teenager Daniel Renko that he’s found himself defending his own sanity off camera. “I have to keep telling people that in real life I’m not a murderer. I’m a nice guy, promise!”

Macari is selling his softer side from a London café, just around the corner from the Jermyn Street Theatre, where he starred in the school-set drama A Level Playing Field. The playwright, Jonathan Lewis, discovered Macari in his father’s musical instrument shop, where Macari worked while finishing school. “One day this guy comes in and wants to buy a trumpet, and we start talking, and he’s like, ‘I’m a writer,’ and I’m like, ‘I’m an actor, and if you buy this trumpet, I’ll tell you more.’” His live-wire performance attracted the interest of his eventual agent, who sent Macari the script for Hard Sun. “Obviously,” he says, “I was freaky enough for them to want me.”

While music is still very much a part of his life—he regularly plays in the pop-rock band Koates and the hardcore-punk band the Rats—Macari intends to see where acting can take him, even if it’s across the pond. “At some point, I’ll be going over to the States,” he says, “but I am quite enjoying being a British boy, so I’m trying to milk that for as long as I can before I get sucked into Los Angeles.”