Mark Mylod isn’t one to brag. If anything, he’s overly critical of himself and his work, freely admitting that his first three movies—What’s Your Number, The Big White, and Ali G Indahouse—weren’t totally up to his standards. But there’s one specific piece of praise that left his jaw on the floor—and he’s finally ready to boast about it. In 2019, the Succession producer and director directed the memorable season two installment “Tern Haven,” which finds the Roy clan spending the episode’s entire run time at the home of another powerful media dynasty family for a weekend of tense negotiations and even tenser meals.

“I was really proud of the episode, and it was well-received critically, but a couple of days after the episode aired, my doorbell rang at my apartment in Brooklyn, I went downstairs, and a young man handed me this beautiful envelope, handwritten with my name on it,” recalls Mylod, gleefully returning to this mind-blowing moment. “I took it upstairs and opened it up, and it was a letter from Steven Spielberg saying how much he loved the episode. I think he said, ‘Directing a dinner party is like fighting a bear—and you won.’”

With an endearing and self-deprecating laugh, Mylod quickly adds, “Not that I’ve memorized it!”

The conclusion is obvious: If Spielberg thinks you’re great at directing dinner parties, then keep directing dinner parties. Three years after “Tern Haven,” Mylod is taking a brief break from the work on Succession’s fourth season—now one of television’s most-talked about and decorated shows—to brace for the release of his first movie in more than a decade, the bloody delicious The Menu. Set at an exclusive fine-dining restaurant on a remote island, Mylod’s “psychological thriller, horror, comedy satire,” as he puts it, serves up gasps and laughs alike, and, maybe, perhaps more important, has finally satisfied the British filmmaker’s appetite for a big-screen win.

After disappointing critical and commercial performances by his first three films, Mylod calls it a “huge relief” to see critics eating up The Menu. “Since I was a kid, it’s been such a burning ambition of mine to make a film that I was really, really proud of, and felt that I’d thrown everything at it that I possibly could,” he tells VF over Zoom, days before The Menu’s wide release. “And that’s not to diss my previous work, of course, everything is a stepping stone as we evolve…. I just try to embrace the things that I was scared of, whereas perhaps in the past I would’ve backed away from that and stayed in my comfort zone. It was really, ‘Okay, if I want the privilege of being able to make a film, I’d better make sure I’ve got something pretty good and clear to say.’”

Mylod found early career success in the UK, his homeland, directing the pilot for the long-running UK series Shameless, and stepping into the wild world of Sacha Baron Cohen as director of the comedian’s debut film, Ali G Indahouse. And then came an unexpected call from America: Would he be interested in directing an episode of HBO’s hit series Entourage? 

“I didn’t even know what Entourage was, so I had to watch a bunch of DVDs, and I just loved it,” says Mylod of the flashy chronicle of an actor’s journey to the A-list, bringing his childhood friends along for the ride. “It was so different from anything I’d done before, and yet, at the same time, there was still some version of family. And it was wild; I couldn’t believe it when I walked on set the first morning, and there were grills going and salad bars and all these different stations to get your juice done. I thought, Is it a public holiday? No, that was just normal. And then we’d have some kind of party scene and I’d be doing my normal horse trading with the production team about how many background people I could have…I’d say, can I have 20, 30, thinking I was really taking a piss, and the assistant director would go, ‘Oh, God no, we need at least 200,’ and I had this big beaming smile over my face, thinking I’m in heaven.”

Mylod directed three episodes in the third season, then became a full-time member of Entourage’s entourage as a producer-director. “It changed my life,” he says. “I felt that I’d hit an impasse in the UK and had drawn back to making commercials, and really didn’t have a creative direction. This offered me a whole new world. I moved to Los Angeles, I met my wife, the costume designer on that show, Amy [Westcott], we have two children together.” He calls it a “reboot in my life.” Other perks of Entourage: “I did one scene in the fifth season where I got to actually direct Martin Scorsese, which is up there in my top five Hollywood moments!”

Once fully settled in Hollywood, Mylod made it his “mission statement” to put himself in a position to direct strong pilot episodes of TV. “I temporarily had the wind knocked out of me on the feature side, but I was finding that I got access to some really lovely scripts,” says Mylod, who was responsible for the first episodes of ABC’s Once Upon a Time, Showtime’s The Affair, and, in a full-circle moment, the American adaptation of Shameless. He admits to being terrified by the proposition of recreating a series he’d helped launch across the pond, but he credits young actors like Emmy Rossum and Jeremy Allen White for convincing him that there was something new to explore. Shameless followed the misadventures of the dysfunctional, lower-class Gallagher family on the South Side of Chicago, and featured a large ensemble cast that included children with little to no acting experience alongside Oscar nominee William H. Macy. Wanting his cast to seem like a true family, Mylod sent them on various day trips, hoping that they’d bond—and get on each other’s nerves.

“Around the third day, Mark Mylod said, ‘We’re sending you to play miniature golf,’” Macy, who starred as the alcoholic and disengaged patriarch, Frank, had previously told me. “I’m old and cranky and I said to myself, ‘What the fuck is this?’ We get to the first hole and Emma [Kenney], who was nine, hits the ball and it bounces out. Then she hits the ball and it goes off in the driveway and then she hits another…everyone is going, ‘That’s okay, do it again!’ I’m standing there for 20 minutes, so I walked up and brushed Emma aside and said, ‘I’m playing through.’ She didn’t fall, but it was more forceful than I thought. I got to about the third hole and thought, I’m an idiot and Mark Mylod’s a genius—I just discovered who Frank Gallagher is. I unlocked it the second I pushed her off that putting green.”

Not long after that strategic golf outing, Mylod left a karaoke machine on the Gallagher house set and soon found the cast fighting over the microphone and screaming Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.” “One of the happiest moments of my career; at that point, I knew we had it,” he says of the beloved series that ended its 11-season run last year. “And every time I hear that song, it literally brings a tear to my eye, because it was so happy, the closeness, the way that they dug into that idea of, what is family, what are those ties that bind?”

Just call Mylod Dominic Toretto, because it truly is all about family for him, whether it’s the Roys or families who are armed with swords and dragons. Looking for something new, Mylod chased down Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to convince them to hire him. His pitch, of course, circled back to his favorite F-word, calling the show “a family drama that just so happens that it was on a vast scale to be set across a whole fantasy world.” He joined the blockbuster HBO series in its fifth season. His favorite scene “was Cersei (Lena Headey) and the king (Mark Addy) discussing the failure of their marriage. It was such a quiet, intimate scene that I thought was devastating, because, whether it’s set in Westeros or wherever, it was a brilliant dissection of a marriage just falling apart. And that was a bonding thing for David, Dan, and I.”

He directed six episodes of the show over three seasons, gaining comfort with visual effects and being exposed to some of Europe’s grandest eateries along the way. But he missed Brooklyn, so he returned Stateside for his next project. Enter the game changer. “I just loved it; it felt so now,” Mylod recalls of the Succession pilot episode from creator Jesse Armstrong and director-producer Adam McKay. “It was a bombastic, tub-thumping paean. There was something about it that just felt like it had the zeitgeist, and I’d never seen anything like it before, that was so content to not give a shit about whether you like any of the characters. I thought it was so ballsy, completely irresistible." Mylod didn’t grow up in the world of the outrageously wealthy, but saw Succession as another family drama “about that corrosive nature of power in those relationships. So on that level, it was a continuation of an ongoing obsession.”

Obsession is an appropriate word when discussing Succession, the ultimate watercooler show even in the work-remote age. Mylod has won two best-drama-series Emmys with the show as a producer, and has been nominated in the directing category twice. Even as he oversaw one of the small screen’s biggest successes, the idea of a possible big-screen return lingered. “I knew I had to wait and wait,” Mylod says. “I thought maybe I could get one more shot to prove myself. Or, more than anything, prove something to myself. And then, when I wasn’t even looking, it just, figuratively, dropped onto my desk.”

Fast-forward to 2020, when Mylod was reunited with the writer of “Tern Haven,” Succession producer Will Tracy. Tracy had written a script with Seth Reiss about 12 wealthy strangers who travel to a one-of-a-kind restaurant for the meal of their lives, only to suddenly find themselves fighting for survival as the renowned chef (Ralph Fiennes) and his loyal staff begin executing their deadly meal plan. “A lot of [‘Tern Haven’] unconsciously ended up being kind of a dress rehearsal for The Menu,” says Mylod, who also points to Robert Altman and his method for working with an ensemble cast as inspiration. “The pacing and aesthetic was very different, but my approach with the actors was the same.”

Suddenly, someone who so adeptly explored the hardships of those living in poverty with Shameless was the go-to for depicting privilege. “It’s odd, isn’t it?” says Mylod. “Ultimately, I think it’s because the humanity and our flaws are very similar, despite what the paycheck might say. I'm always obsessed with flaws and how we all struggle to make our way through the world… It's still humans just trying to work out a problem. And particularly with characters who are so quite unlikable on the surface, in the case of both Succession and The Menu, I have a little obsession…with peeling back those layers and finding out what’s inside, beyond the vanity and the entitlement.”

Mylod needed to hit a specific “mash-up of elements” for The Menu: part satire, part dark comedy, and part horror. “I could feel how tricky that would be to achieve, but I also felt very excited, because I could sense it, I could foresee it…and I thought I could get us there.” 

He achieved it through a week of rehearsals, and conversations about the themes and dynamics with his cast, which included Fiennes as the disgusted chef Julian Slowik, Anya Taylor-Joy as an unexpected guest, Nicholas Hoult as an overly obsessed foodie, Hong Chau as Slowik’s no-nonsense second-in-command, and John Leguizamo as an aging, name-dropping movie star. For Mylod, this collaboration ensures that the cast is “tuning in like some forested roots connecting by osmosis,” and allows him to understand how to get the best out of each of them. “Mark's a brilliant director,” said Succession star Sarah Snook, “because he’s quite hands off at letting something evolve and be organic and then just cherry picking, like ‘Let’s just highlight that a bit more. Let’s bring that out a bit more.’”

Working closely with a talented collection of actors was already old hat for Mylod, but he worried about the real people he was satirizing. During his research, he came away with a newfound respect for the culinary art form and those involved, from the busboys to the celebrity faces of the operation. Mylod recruited Dominique Crenn, the only female chef to land three Michelin stars, to help maintain a taste of respect and authenticity, while another chef, John Benhase, trained Fiennes and the kitchen staff actors, all of whom were required to have previous restaurant experience. And still, despite the film’s food bona fides and rave reviews out of TIFF, Mylod was nervous about what a different group of critics would think. “A massive emotional relief was doing a screening at the New York City Wine & Food Festival, which was entirely for people working in restaurants and chefs,” Mylods says. “At the Q&A afterwards, somebody stood up and said, ‘We feel seen for the first time on film,’ and I could have cried. I was so happy and relieved that we portrayed that world accurately without being disrespectful, but still having a great poke at the excesses of the art that’s become corroded by commerce.”

It’s a well-earned victory lap for Mylod, who can’t spend too long celebrating—he’s currently in production on Succession season four. But as he continues to thrive in television, he’s also eager to capitalize on his second life in movies. “I want to make more features,” Mylod says of his desire to navigate both mediums simultaneously. “I suppose I’ve proved to myself that I’ve got story to tell and a way to do it, so I’m hungry to push that forward.”

Despite his successes, he still has an underdog mentality and drive. 

“I think imposter syndrome is lifelong, and you dull it down a little bit every now and then, but you’re one project away from your next face plant,” he says with a laugh. “It’s always lurking, and as soon as you think you’ve banished that and get remotely cocky, it'll turn around and bite you in the ass. So you've got to keep your edge, and I find fear of failure to be a very healthy stimulus. I’ve been directing for quite a while, but it’s only relatively recently that I feel I really have something to say…that my inner storytelling voice feels refined enough and clear enough. So that gives me an added confidence and courage in the projects that I chase after. My fear when we go into every season of Succession, Jesse and I were just talking about this: Let’s not get complacent. I feel that I’ve been around long enough to see the myriad mistakes, missteps that I’ve taken, and there’s always a new one that you don’t see that trips you up. But I’ll at least try to avoid making the same mistake twice.”