Carey Mulligan: ‘Acting still terrifies me. But I love it so much’

CAREY MULLIGAN HAS PROVED HER WORTH AS AN ACTOR MANY TIMES WITH HER LATEST ROLE IN THE DARK REVENGE COMEDY PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN EARNING THE ACTOR AN OSCAR NOMINATION

The much-discussed Promising Young Woman, a dark revenge comedy from writer-director Emerald Fennell, starts as it means to go on.

The film’s heroine Cassie Thomas, essayed in an Oscar-nominated turn by Carey Mulligan, is sitting alone, spectacularly drunk, in a nightclub. Her inebriated state attracts the attention and mockery of a group of young suited men, including Jerry (Adam Brody) an archetypal “nice guy” who offers to see Cassie home. When his attentions turn out to be not so nice, his would-be victim bolts upright and speaks clearly and soberly: “What are you doing?” she demands.

It’s the first of many sucker punches – from production designer Michael Perry’s deceptive use of bright candy colours, to the film’s wildly controversial final sequence.

“Reading it for the first time was like watching the film,” says Mulligan, speaking via Zoom from London. “I had no idea what to expect. I hadn’t been given any kind of brief before. So I read it completely fresh. And even that first moment before the title sequence, when she sits up stone sober, I remember gasping as I read it. I couldn’t put the script down. I was blown away by it. It was such brilliant writing. From scene to scene, I couldn’t have dreamt what was coming next.”

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It’s a big swing from Mulligan and a huge feature debut for the multitalented Emerald Fennell, who won admirers with her depiction of Camilla Parker Bowles in two seasons of The Crown – 2016 to present – and as showrunner for the second series of Killing Eve.

“Emerald is just the best,” Mulligan says. “You just want to hang out with her. So much of the performance was just chatting with her. I didn’t need to learn to ride a horse. I didn’t need to learn how to speak French. It was just about the two of us chatting away, suggesting things between takes, trying to establish who the character was. I just put all my faith in her and she was so rock solid. It reminded me of working with Paul Dano on Wildlife. They are both actors and there was a similarity in style. Because Emerald is used to being in front of the camera, she can spot the holes that you get into.”

Mulligan called out a review of the film that appeared in Variety for implying that she "wasn't hot enough"

The film’s blackly comic premise is made inkier by Cassie’s back story and a trauma experienced by Cassie’s best friend. Promising Young Woman, as noted by Jeannette Catsoulis’ review in the New York Times, “ isn’t a revenge fantasy so much as a sad tale of warped grief and blazing fury”.   “It always felt to me to be a story about grief and love,” nods Mulligan. “She’s stuck in a moment. She’s stuck with the pain she’s experienced. We talked a lot about shame and addiction and self-harm. The sort of night-time adventures that she’s going on; she knows that they’re not healthy. There’s a rush from the moment of revenge, from catching these men out. But it quickly wears off and she’s left again back in the same place. She’s had to become adept at hiding it. Even how she dresses is a way of signalling: ‘I’m totally fine, you don’t need to worry about me. Look, I’ve got multicoloured nail polish’.”   Mulligan has proved her worth as an actor many times since her bouncy turn as Kitty Bennet in Pride & Prejudice. The star of An Education (2009), Shame (2011), Mudbound (2017) and, The Dig (2021), has, however, never before been afforded the opportunity to smash up a stranger’s car with a tire iron.

“My wrap gift from Emerald was the necklace that says ‘crazy f**king bitch’ on the back,” says Mulligan. “‘Crazy f**king bitch’ is what the guy screams at me when I’m smashing up his car. It’s my favourite insult of the whole film.”

For all the chatter about Fennell’s script and Mulligan’s performance, some of the press around the project has threatened to eclipse the film. Speaking to the New York Times late last year, Mulligan called out a review of the film that appeared in Variety for implying that she “wasn’t hot enough”.

“Mulligan, a fine actress, seems a bit of an odd choice as this admittedly many-layered apparent femme fatale,” read the review by Dennis Harvey. “Margot Robbie is a producer here, and one can (perhaps too easily) imagine the role might once have been intended for her. Whereas with this star, Cassie wears her pickup-bait gear like bad drag; even her long blonde hair seems a put-on.”

“I think in criticising or bemoaning a lack of attractiveness on my part in a character, it wasn’t a personal slight,” Mulligan countered. “It didn’t wound my ego, but it made me concerned that in such a big publication an actress’s appearance could be criticised and it could be accepted as completely reasonable criticism.”

Variety has subsequently apologised for the review. But it’s part of an alarming catalogue of unpleasant encounters that Mulligan has endured during her career. She understandably doesn’t do a great deal of press. She is guarded about her husband, Mumford & Sons frontman Marcus Mumford, and their two children, Evelyn and Wilfred. And who can blame her? There were many bemused accounts of Mulligan’s polite responses to a barrage of idiotic questions at The Kering Women in Motion Talk series at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015. “How did the 2016 election impact your performance as a 1950s housewife in Wildlife?” asked one journalist. “What would she think if I told her she was very beautiful?” enquired another attendee through a translator.

It gets worse. After working with Joel and Ethan Coen on 2013’s Inside Llewyn Davis, she was asked: “Your character in Inside Llewyn Davis has an abortion. Would you ever have an abortion?” Promising Young Woman, too, has inspired its fair share of silly, sexist questions, she notes.

'...A woman who commits wholeheartedly on behalf of her friend has to be crazy. Whereas with the male version of this, that's not even a question. He's passionate...'

“It’s interesting and funny. I’ve had a couple of people question Cassie’s sanity. I was talking to one journalist before Christmas and he said: ‘But by the end isn’t she just crazy?’ And I said: ‘Did it ever occur to you that Liam Neeson was crazy in Taken?’ It probably never crossed his mind. We don’t associate this kind of behaviour with women. We know women who are powerful. We know women in important jobs can be accused of being all sorts of things. But a woman who commits wholeheartedly on behalf of her friend has to be crazy. Whereas with the male version of this, that’s not even a question. He’s passionate. He’s determined. He’s loyal. Not crazy.”

Carey Hannah Mulligan was born in 1985 in London, to Nano and Stephen Mulligan, a Liverpudlian hotel manager of Irish descent, a job that brought the family to Germany. Carey and her brother studied at the International School of Düsseldorf until she was eight. Her aunt, she says, “was an amazing cellist”, but there were no other family connections with the arts until young Carey watched her sibling in a school production of The King and I. As a teenager, she wrote to Kenneth Branagh and sought advice from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes. The latter advised her to marry a lawyer, but, impressed by her determination, he helped her to land the role of Kitty in Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice. She worked as an errand runner at Ealing Studios until, aged 18, she made her theatrical debut in Forty Winks at the Royal Court Theatre.

“I loved working at Ealing Studios just because I would see actors arriving on set and it made me feel a little bit closer to it,” says Mulligan. “I was very lucky to have met Julian Fellowes who introduced me to somebody who introduced me to somebody. That was a real twist of fate. I was very lucky to get the audition for Pride & Prejudice. It all felt quite fluky for a long time after. I definitely felt unqualified. The more theatre I did, the more I felt. Lone Scherfig was so brilliant at helping me to work on camera. I didn’t know I had just been winging it before, but I had been. After that, I realised: okay, you don’t need to do every job that comes along. I mean, it still terrifies me. And I’m still useless on the first day filming. But I love it so much. I feel ridiculously lucky to get to do such a fun job.”

She remains selective about her roles and has, accordingly, been directed by an impressive list of filmmakers including the Coens, Steve McQueen, Dee Rees, Oliver Stone and Michael Mann.

“I only really do jobs that I feel incredibly strongly about,” she says. “And if I’ve heard from a reliable source that a person involved in the job isn’t very nice, then it doesn’t matter to me if the film is Sophie’s Choice. I’m just never going to do it. This is the best job in the world. Everyone needs to remember that. But it’s not worth doing with people who make it unnecessarily difficult by behaving badly.”

Red flags aside, Mulligan has a very clear idea of what she's looking for in a script. "At this stage I just want to play women that feel real. I think real-life women are so under-represented in cinema, especially in the last 20 years or so. I keep getting asked: is it getting better for women? I genuinely think that there's more great writing for women around now than at any time since I started acting. But there's still a scarcity of female roles that I look at on screen and think: oh yeah, I feel like I know what you're going through; you're not perfect and you're not unwaveringly supporting your genius husband. There's not many of those parts around." 

Promising Young Woman will be available on Sky Cinema and NOW from April 16th