How a 30-Year-Old Mastermind Fooled an Entire High School Into Thinking He Was a Teen—And What It Means for Trust in the Digital Age
McLeod has never stopped thinking of MacKinnon, and so he decided to make a documentary about what he experienced firsthand as a teenager, reaching out to his classmates — many for the first time in decades — to have them share their own murky memories of this unusual conman. Utilizing animation alongside sitdown interviews with Bearsden alum — as well as recreating the classrooms of Bearsden Academy, which has been torn down — My Old School is nostalgic and whimsical. And it features an intriguing conceit: McLeod tapped Tony-winning fellow Scotsman Alan Cumming to “play” the disgraced man, lip-syncing along to an interview MacKinnon gave McLeod. (The agreement was that McLeod could record MacKinnon’s audio, but not shoot any video.) We see Cumming, but we hear MacKinnon, giving My Old School an extra layer of subterfuge — not to mention a weird sense of poetic justice since Cumming was, years ago, planning on directing and starring in a movie about MacKinnon.
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