13-Year-Old ‘Lord of the Flies’ Star David McKenna Embraced the Wild in His Screen Debut

In William Golding’s 1954 novel “Lord of the Flies,” Piggy represents order. He’s not the most charismatic boy marooned on the deserted island, nor does he hold the most sway among his peers. But he’s the glue that binds the group together, and — spoiler alert! — his murder destroys any sense of civilization.

So when Jack Thorne, co-creator of last year’s “Adolescence,” set out to adapt Golding’s dystopian classic about schoolboys’ descent into savagery, he needed an actor who could become a brainy, bespectacled paragon of order. In February 2024, an open casting call found its way to the mother of David McKenna, a Belfast child with acting aspirations. Instead of a script, there was a prompt: “It said,” McKenna recalled, “‘if you were stranded on a tropical island, who would you want to be stranded with?’”

His answer? The West End cast of “Les Misérables.”

As you might have guessed, McKenna, now 13, is a theater kid. He took his first acting class at age 4 and has appeared in many school productions, but he’d never done anything as big as a Netflix limited series. After he sent off his audition, casting directors Nina Gold and Martin Ware pulled him into a wider vetting process involving chemistry tests with his eventual co-stars — including British actor Winston Sawyers, who plays Ralph, a rational, good-hearted lad who becomes Piggy’s ally as the island falls into lawlessness.

“I think Winston and I have quite a similar relationship to Ralph and Piggy,” McKenna said. “We’re very, very different people — different backgrounds, different experiences. We don’t have that much in common, but when you put us together, we actually do get on really well. We accept each other, and we did that from day one.”

Delivering his first on-screen performance deep in the rainforests of Malaysia amid torrential storms certainly took some getting used to.

“It was mental,” McKenna said. “Our hotel was built in the jungle, literally. It was a resort built in the jungle, so you’d walk out and there’d just be monkeys and lizards saying good morning. From a hotel where we were getting our costumes done, we’d get a speedboat to this remote island in the middle of the ocean, and we’d be hiking up mountains. It was physically hard, hiking those mountains in those rainforests.”

McKenna worked with acting coach Tommy Lawrence, who encouraged him to create a backstory for Piggy that would fill lacunae from the novel.

“Tommy Lawrence, who’s brilliant, he and I during the rehearsal process would talk about it a lot, the way Piggy’s grown up,” he said. “He’s around adults loads. He’s not really around kids. In the lunch break at school, he goes and hangs around with the teachers — which is quite similar to me, to be fair.”

Before being cast, McKenna was aware of “Lord of the Flies” but had not yet cracked the book. Once he dove deeper into the story, he found it to be shockingly relevant to modern times.

“If you put 30 boys today on that island, I think the same thing would happen, which is sad, but I think that is the truth,” he said. “There needs to be a world where that doesn’t happen, which I think is possible but very far away.”

McKenna enjoyed playing a character who is not afraid to stand up for what he believes in, even if that integrity leads to his death. And it’s a horrific one. In the book, a member of Jack’s group drops a boulder on Piggy, who tumbles off a ledge and shatters his skull before being swept out to sea. It happens relatively quickly, whereas in Thorne’s adaptation, it is a grueling 17-minute ordeal.

“That scene was meant to be so much longer. There’s a lot that was cut, a lot of dialogue between Ralph and Piggy,” McKenna said. “Marc Munden, the director, might have mentioned that the edit was at one point too gruesome and they had to tone it down a little bit.”

Those saddened by Piggy’s demise can at least look forward to 2027, when McKenna will be seen in Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew.” He’s still mapping out what comes after that.

“I’d like to do something at home in Belfast, something with an Irish crew,” he said. “I’d like to do theater. But I’d also like to play roles that make people take away something and make people cry. That’s quite fun.”

This story first ran in the Limited Series/TV Movie issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.