Charlie Mackesy swears this whole thing started because he was trying to cheer up his friends. No grand plan, no publishing roadmap—just a WhatsApp thread, some doodles, a boy with a too-large head, a very small mole, a fox who needs therapy, and a horse who speaks like the world’s softest oracle. That combination somehow turned into the global phenomenon The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, and now the Apple TV+ animated film that feels destined to live on the same shelf as Winnie the Pooh and the childhood books you pretend you didn’t cry over.
But the way Mackesy tells it, none of this was intentional. “I was literally just drawing things to cheer up my friends,” he says. “I didn’t think they were good enough to make a book.” He gestures off-camera toward what he swears is a small mountain range of sketches. It looks like someone shook open the drawers of a thousand Victorian illustrators and dumped them on his floor. Somewhere in those stacks, the boy appeared—quiet, soft-spoken, totally unbothered by his own existential dread. “He just sort of was, you know?” Mackesy shrugs. “There’s a part of me that’s still that boy.”
He’s not kidding. The film opens on two simple words: “I’m lost.” Mackesy talks about them like they arrived already underlined. “So much of life is trying to impress people,” he says. “But what we want is connection. And connection comes from being vulnerable.” So instead of beginning with exposition, action, or a cute critter moment, he lets the boy just—say it. Out loud. Into the universe. “It sums up a lot of how I’ve felt my whole life,” he admits. “And still do.”
For a story built from animals that talk like seasoned therapists, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse isn’t afraid of darkness. Mackesy grew up on the animated films of the ’70s and ’80s—the ones where rabbits battled fascism and small woodland creatures learned about mortality before lunch. It tracks. This film isn’t grim, but it doesn’t flinch either. “Life is difficult,” he says simply. “I didn’t want to avoid anything. The storm needed to be there. The boy needed to crumple and say, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ I’ve been in that place many times.”
The fox embodies that part of us that bites because we’re scared, the parts that don’t trust anyone, the parts that would rather snarl than connect. And then there’s the horse—Gabriel Byrne, who Mackesy recruited in the most polite old-fashioned way possible. “I hand-wrote a letter in ink,” he says. “We couldn’t reach him any other way.” Two weeks later, his phone rang. “He just said, ‘Charlie, I am the horse.’” Mackesy nearly fell over.
The mole, voiced by Tom Hollander, was always his comic philosopher, capable of flipping from profound to ridiculous with one line. And the boy—voiced by Jude Coward Nicoll—needed long, stretched vowels. “Where I grew up in the Scottish borders, the accent sounds like the landscape,” Mackesy says. “That long ‘lost’… it’s like a hill.” Idris Elba as the fox completed the quartet, delivering what Mackesy calls “the film’s dropped truths” with a gravelly gentleness.
Even the music comes with a story wrapped in a story. Composer Isobel Waller-Bridge, a friend of Mackesy’s, would get voice notes from him humming rough ideas—sometimes standing in a field, sometimes in the bath, sometimes moments after a robin flew into his car. He retrieved the bird gently from the grill and held it as it died. “I was distraught,” he says. “I’d been feeding them all winter. And this one… didn’t make it.” The tune he hummed that night became “Hymn to the Robin,” the emotional spine of the film’s finale. “The music had to feel right,” Mackesy says. “Gentle, nurturing, deep—but with levity.”
This is how he creates: not with outlines, but instincts. It’s almost comically earnest. “I wasn’t even sure what I was doing,” he says. “I made the book without quite understanding it. I still don’t quite understand why people have responded the way they have.” But then he’ll casually drop something like, “Real connection comes from telling the truth of who we really are,” and you’re reminded why millions of people screenshot his drawings for comfort.
Does he think there’s more story to tell? Oh, absolutely. “There are thousands of drawings in this house,” he says. “Some didn’t make the book or the film. I’d love them to have more adventures.”
What makes Mackesy’s work hit so hard is that he’s not trying to teach you anything. He is, by his own admission, just trying to survive the bewildering parts of being human. Which is maybe why the lines land like they do. Asking for help isn’t giving up—it’s refusing to give up. He remembers the moment he wrote it. “It came out of me viscerally,” he says. “Saying ‘help’ looks like weakness, but it’s a real strength.”
Everything in this world—boy, mole, fox, horse—comes back to that one idea. Vulnerability is the doorway to connection. Connection is the doorway to hope. Hope is the thing that carries you home.
And sometimes, home looks like four unlikely friends on a page, saying the quietest, bravest things out loud.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
