MacKenzie McHale

MacKenzie Morgan McHale

"I've come to put your IQ and your talent to some patriotic fucking use."

Just F.Y.I.

NAME: MacKenzie McHale
NICKNAMES: Mac
AGE: 36
GENDER: Female
HAIR: Brown
EYES: Brown
HEIGHT: 5'8"
WEIGHT: 125lbs
BUILD: Slender

MARITAL STATUS: Single
SEXUALITY: Straight
OCCUPATION: Executive Producer of News Night with Will McAvoy on ACN
CURRENT RESIDENCE: Part-time at the Nexus Hotel, part time at an apartment in Midtown Manhattan.

The Player

CONTACT: Dropbox.
TIME ZONE: EST

ASK YOUR EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

MacKenzie McHale is a bit of a mess. She’s a little flighty and easily flustered, counts on her fingers and really does not understand the implications of reply all. She gets overly invested in just about everything, be that office gossip or her actual job and she certainly doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who is capable of running a nightly broadcast with any measure of success.

MacKenzie McHale is not the sum of her parts.

She is passionate about damned near everything and uses that passion to inspire those around her, especially ex-boyfriend and star anchor Will McAvoy. She doesn’t understand the implications of repealing Glass-Steagall but she knows that the single most important aspect of her work is to create a well-informed American electorate and to cut through the crap and bullshit to get to the truth and the news, not the distractions. She is smart, savvy and on-point when it comes to her professional life and a complete mess in the personal.

MacKenzie’s greatest strength is her greatest weakness: she cares just a little too much about what people think of her. She doesn’t want to be rejected, or hurt, and will actively cause that to happen on her terms rather than risk being blindsided. While she fully believes she’s a capable and competent woman professionally, she has trouble letting that self-confidence bleed over to other aspects of her life. MacKenzie owns her mistakes. She takes a hit, learns from it, and tries to do better the next time and strive to be more than what she appears to be on the outside.

Above all, she’s an idealist. She honestly believes that good can prevail and that truth and justice will win out over gossip and infotainment masquerading as news of national importance. She believes she can earn Will’s forgiveness for cheating on him. While Will’s the one on the mission to civilize, MacKenzie, in a way, is just as much a Don Quixote.

HER CREDENTIALS ARE READILY AVAILABLE

For MacKenzie McHale, life is divided into two eras delineated by one singular event: before she cheated on Will McAvoy, and after. American born in spite of being British, she studied journalism in university and won two Peabodys for her achievements in the field. At some point, she had a dysfunctional relationship with a reporter named Brian before he dumped her and she met the man who would define a good portion of her professional and personal life: star-anchor Will McAvoy.

The relationship was perfect but MacKenzie sabotaged herself and, realizing she loved Will, told him that she’d cheated on him with her ex. It went about as well as expected, considering she'd just admitted to cheating on him to prove she loved him (it was a backward logic, at best) and MacKenzie and Will parted ways: she to the war-torn Middle East to cover civil unrest and he to making a bigger name for himself as ACN's headline anchor and a man who billed himself to be liked by everyone by not having an opinion on anything.

While embedded, MacKenzie suffered her own share of tragedies while covering the tragedies of others, including a serious personal injury and the endangerment of her crew. After over two years and no prospects for a position at any of the major networks stateside, she took a chance by showing up to a debate at Northwestern where she saw Will again and inspired him to rise above neutrality to deliver an incendiary diatribe about how America is not the best country in the world. She also accepted a risky position as EP at ACN's News Night once more at the behest of the news division's president and unbeknownst to Will; he renegotiated his contract solely to be able to fire her.

With the professional equivalent of the Sword of Damocles hanging over her head, MacKenzie threw herself headlong into making News Night the smart, informed show that it ought to have been to begin with and helped push Will from affable and inoffensive to a political dynamo unafraid to ask the tough questions and no longer concerned with bringing viewers to the advertisers but concerned, instead, with informing the American electorate on key issues.

This bold statement didn’t come without a price, though, and pressure from ACN executives and the tabloids threaten to destroy everything they’ve worked so hard to build and sends Will spiraling into stress-induced depression.

MacKenzie comes from The Newsroom 2x03 “Willie Pete” just after she speaks with Nina Howard and learns (erroneously, though MacKenzie believes it to be true) that the message Will left her while he was high wasn’t about their personal relationship and was, instead, about how good she is at her job and how well they covered the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. This is something that obviously crushes MacKenzie because up until this point she believed the message was about Will’s feelings for her and she had hope that maybe they could get back together. This hope is now completely shattered.