Mark Millar – Favourite Things

Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.

Mark Millar is the President of Netflix’s Millarworld Division in Los Angeles, overseeing the 17 franchises Netflix bought when they purchased his company in 2017, now creating new concepts and sequels in-house. He’s also the New York Times best-selling writer of Kick-Ass, Kingsman and Wanted, all three of which were adapted from his graphic novels into blockbuster Hollywood movies and for ten years was a lead writer at Marvel in New York. He is married to Lucy Millar, a CEO at Netflix, and has three children.

These are a few of his favourite things…

The Pub

Covid has been hard on everyone, but please spare a thought for those of us who drink too much and love staggering home with a kebab. I haven’t had so little to drink in a single year since I was about twelve. It’s insane. I really miss visiting my friends and family, but nowhere near as much as I miss the four different pubs I try to hit every week. It’s such a crucial part of the Scottish psyche to be surrounded by your pals, tearing strips off one another all night, and then forgetting everything when you get home and your wife asks what everyone was talking about. I have about five little posse’s, ranging from the Dads at school to neighbours to old school friends. Remember when you were thirteen and you were too old to be cooped up in your bedroom every night, but too young to get served in a bar? Every evening was spent walking around the streets in a large group, it feels as kif we’ve all been reduced to this again. How much longer before our crew of writers, actors, medics, lawyers, investment bankers and teachers are reduced to drinking cider down the swing park?

The Delingpod

Like a lot of paid-up lefties, I really enjoy James Delingpole’s podcast. This isn’t as weird as it sounds: it’s almost weirder that I’m still in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. I love Delingpole’s irreverence and he’s been a terrible loss to The Spectator this past year. I wouldn’t want him running the country (tax would be 1p in the pound and both badgers and social workers would be shot on sight), but he writes like an angel and his interviews are far more interesting than anything we get on the BBC. His hour with Peter Hitchens in 2018 is the most important conversation of the last ten years. I like being challenged by players on the other team and in an age when mono-think is compulsory, and school-kids will soon be reciting the Green Party manifesto instead of The Lord’s Prayer every morning, he’s more essential than ever.

Fridays

Everyone loves Fridays because the week is almost over, but I love them because it already is. About eight or nine years ago my wife and I switched to a four-day week, getting up a little earlier and working a little longer Mondays to Thursdays and taking every single Friday off. It’s like Jeremy Corbyn made it to Number 10 because every weekend is three days long and the kids have no idea what we’re doing once we wave them off at the school gate. We go for breakfast, we go for a swim, we go see a movie, we grab some lunch and then pick them up at home-time, feigning exhaustion from all our hard work, hoping they can’t smell the chlorine or the Chicken Tikka Masala. When we sold our company, Millarworld, to Netflix in 2017 and came on staff as executives, this was our only request. We have a lot of phone calls and Zoom meetings in the job, just like everyone else in Hollywood, but we never, ever, ever take a call on a Friday. The only downside of this is that the Friday Feeling everyone else gets around 2pm has started to seep into our Thursday afternoons.

Not having a mobile phone

Everyone thinks I’m kidding when I say I don’t have a phone and I sort of am because I have an old 2002 Nokia, out of charge and lying in a drawer somewhere. I do use it occasionally but being a Nokia I last had to charge it in 2011 and it’s still got two or three bars left. I remember predicting that the 1990s phone craze would be as short-lived as Pokémon cards. How wrong I was. But I’ve stuck to my guns and still can’t stand them, glaring at anyone who sits their phone on the table at lunch or dinner. If I go for a walk, it’s uninterrupted. If I’m lying in bed at night, I’m having a kip, not checking Twitter. I’m obsessed with social media, but it’s all on my desk-top and by 6pm it’s all switched off until I start at 7am the following morning. I worked with the director Tony Scott years back and he was very suspicious of technology too. Instead of email he hand-wrote a message on a postcard and had an assistant scan it and email it to you. It was incredibly charming. Christopher Nolan doesn’t even do email, last I heard. It’s entirely possible to work successfully in the arts without queuing up outside the Apple Shop.

The Kids

I know, I know. It’s unbearable when people say things like this in interviews. Like those “Ideal Dinner Party” questions where people say Jesus, Gandhi and their lovely next door neighbours. It always sounds so insincere and a desperate attempt at likability, but it’s actually true and I have to confess I’m still a bit shocked myself. I never imagined I could love another human being as much as I love my rare, poly-bagged pristine copy of Superman #400. Yes, it’s knackering and my God I’ve aged so much more than my fresh-faced colleagues who decided not to bother and have scorching holidays every year instead. But the kids really are great and every day they seem to bring a crazy new joy, the most recent being a passion for American superhero comics from the 1950s. They are already into all the movies and TV shows I like. Now they’re reading comics from before I was born. Seinfeld said that when you become a parent you don’t need to make friends anymore because you can basically make your own people, and he’s kind of right. I’m reminded of this every time my six-year-old daughter asks to watch Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger again. I’ve basically turned them into tiny, blonde middle-aged men, but they’re going to rule the world when they grow up.