In a private suite on the first floor of a swish central London hotel, right next to an ornate sofa, Carey Mulligan is emulating an ungainly physical stance that she calls “mid-squat”. She did it first at last year’s Bafta awards, when her name was announced, incorrectly it eventually transpired, as the winner of the best actress gong for her role in the #MeToo drama She Said. You didn’t see it, of course, because the gaffe was cut from the BBC broadcast, but the 38-year-old Maestro star recreates it today, in between snorts and chuckles, as the comedy highlight of the night. She remembers mostly being frozen to the spot, not quite standing and not quite sitting, while her agent beside her mouthed the words “What the f***?” and her best buddy Jamie Dornan, who was two rows in front, burst into hysterical laughter. Everyone else in the Royal Festival Hall, meanwhile, was “just kind of slow clapping as if to say, ‘This feels very wrong.’”
There’s also a backstory, which she recounts at breakneck speed, about how her She Said performance, although well-liked, was never a trophy contender and that the front-runner Kerry Condon, was expected to win for The Banshees of Inisherin, and did. But the deaf actor and presenter Troy Kotsur signed the word “Kerry”, which was announced by the interpreter as “Carey” and thus chaos ensued. The tale ends with a last-minute Bafta screen flashing Condon’s name around the hall, and Mulligan flopping back into her seat with a hugely relieved “Oh, my, God.” But the point is, as the three-time Oscar-nominated actress well knows, awards matter.
For we are here to talk about her Oscar and Bafta-nominated turn as Felicia Montealegre, the long-suffering wife of Leonard Bernstein in Bradley Cooper’s startling biopic Maestro. We’re at a moment in the awards race when voters in both academies have yet to cast their final ballots, and Mulligan is refreshingly honest about the allure of these prizes. She watched this year’s Oscar nominations announcement live, with her “heart racing”, in the Devonshire farmhouse that she shares with her husband, the singer-songwriter Marcus Mumford (of Mumford & Sons). He had placed round the TV screen Post-it notes containing encouraging mottos such as “You’re great!” just in case.
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The Oscar nomination, she says, “is just the coolest thing. Because it’s from your peers. It’s wicked.” And the thousands (literally) of actors that I’ve met who say that awards don’t matter and that it’s the work that counts? “They are 100 per cent lying.”
Of this year’s snubs, including no best director Oscar nomination for the director of Barbie, Greta Gerwig, she says: “I’m gutted for Greta because I don’t know what else you can do as a director to get nominated. You make a critically acclaimed film that’s also an incredible global success, and yet you don’t get nominated?”
And what about the five-time Bafta-nominated Saltburn, directed by her friend Emerald Fennell, in which Mulligan almost steals the show as the recovering posh waif “Poor Dear” Pamela? The movie was ignored by the Oscars. “I went to the Saltburn premiere in LA and I sat with Em and there were 1,700 people having just the greatest f***ing experience, so I don’t know,” she says. “I think the main takeaway is just how incredibly it was picked up. Initially, people didn’t know how to respond and then suddenly it took over the internet and now it’s become this enormous phenomenon where you can buy candles [on Etsy and Amazon] called Jacob Elordi’s Bathwater.”
Mulligan explains how much of Poor Dear Pamela was improvised (basically, the “Where is Liverpool?” scene), and how, for such a small role, she invested so much detail in it. “We made up this backstory that Pamela was responsible for the Verve breaking up,” she says, hooting. “And so we had all these Richard Ashcroft tattoos done that you don’t see in the film. But it was such a ball.” Pamela works, of course, because of the unexpected pathos that Mulligan brings to the role. There’s a wordless shot of Pamela, at a long dining table, while she’s being discussed and dissected by others, and it’s devastatingly sad, delivered by a performer operating with sublime precision.
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The sense indeed that Mulligan is an actress transformed, if not reborn, is also crucial to an understanding of Maestro. For 20 years she has been lauded and rightfully awarded (a Bafta best actress award for An Education) for a screen persona that is often defined by emotions withheld — see also The Dig, Drive, Suffragette and Far from the Madding Crowd. Or, as Meryl Streep said recently, while presenting Mulligan with the “international star of the year” award at the Palm Springs Film Festival: “The emotion is always palpable and full and felt, but it’s often tucked away and maybe disguised or hidden in reserve.” Not any more. Montealegre in Maestro, all Chilean vowels, subterranean fury and tragic destiny, is a monumental turn, five years in the making.
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She hasn’t auditioned for a role since 2014, she says — the story of her involvement in Maestro is more involved (and fun) than that. Mulligan met her co-star and director Bradley Cooper in 2018, and the pair tell a meet-cute story of how a stage curtain fell on Mulligan’s head during her solo Broadway show of Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys. She continued through the play undaunted until Cooper escorted her to the emergency room. At which point her future collaborator, astounded by her commitment, decided: “She’s the one — she’ll never quit.”
The real story of Mulligan’s Maestro commitment is more complicated than that. It is tied, she says, to her Englishness, natural reticence and revulsion at the idea of doing anything “actorly” or indulgent. Such as? Staying in character all day on set, attending three months of art classes for a single painting sequence that will eventually be cut from the film, and enduring a full week in a “dream workshop” as part of a primal attempt to forge a subconscious bond between the character and her own psyche.
Yet Mulligan did all this, and more, to play Montealegre, even though, she says, it was anathema to the jokey, blokey, larkier self she liked to be on previous film sets. “I always loved being one of the lads with the crew, and I never wanted to isolate myself from people by doing anything excruciating like staying in your dialect between takes,” she says. Cooper, apparently, disabused her of this notion. “He said, ‘There’s no other way to do this, you cannot flip between these two people.’”
It helped too that at the same time Mulligan was engaged in a game of “compare and contrast” on the home front. She says that she found herself repeatedly praising her husband for being “such an artist” yet never quite having the temerity to imagine herself in the same light. She was, well, “just an actor”. Under Cooper’s instruction, she threw all self-doubt aside and produced the most commanding and virtuosic female characterisation of the year.
At the film’s climax, Montealegre snaps and, after years of indulging Bernstein’s betrayals, egomania and contrarian behaviour, finally erupts with “Your truth is a f***ing lie!” It’s a seismic moment. And yes, her best actress rival and close friend Emma Stone is remarkable in Poor Things, and a win for Lily Gladstone for the Scorsese snooze-fest Killers of the Flower Moon will be an important milestone for representation. But this is the performance.
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Speaking of Mumford, I had been warned that all personal questions would be off the table. I had read that although Mulligan and Mumford had met at a summer Christian camp, aged 12, and reignited their relationship 15 years later, got married and had three children, she immediately shuts down any mention of their life together. Yet today? Marcus this, Marcus that, Marcus everywhere. What gives? “I find it easier now because when we were first married I was really conscious of thinking, ‘I am not part of a celebrity couple. That’s just weird.’ And we were both trying to build our careers in our own rights.” She says that the “no marriage questions” policy has outlived its usefulness or relevance, especially now, “when we’ve been married for ever, and he came to the Golden Globes with me, and I bring him to the big things because it’s just more fun when he’s there”.
I mention too that her silence over her Christian childhood has meant that, in the absence of facts, observers imagine that she’s now become a vessel of super-super-Christianity when this might not be the case. “I don’t think I would describe myself as super-super-Christian,” she says, perplexed. “But I was definitely brought up going to church and I still go to church, but it’s not, like, a hot topic. I’m very happy to say that I’m Christian and I go to church.”
Between the ages of three and eight, Mulligan lived in Germany when her father, Stephen, a hotel manager, had a job in Düsseldorf. She says it had no great impact other than allowing her to perform in The King and I at the city’s International School, and sample the buzz of the boards. Her teenage years were spent in Surrey, and she played her first screen role, as Kitty Bennet in the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice, after a school visit from Julian Fellowes led to a follow-up fan letter and an important meeting with a casting director.
An Education soon arrived and launched a high-profile film career for someone who was, and still is, “not a cinephile in any way. To this day I’ll make time to watch The Traitors, but I’m not watching lots of films.” She’s also an award-winning theatre actress, but, she says, having three children under eight mostly rules out a return to the stage. “It would have to be in a school holiday window,” she says. “I thought it would be harder when they were little to do it, but missing bedtime at the end of the day, when your children are a little bit older, is trickier.”
Do her children understand what she does yet? “I think it’s easier to understand what Daddy does,” she says. “Making music is easier. Film is still pretty challenging, but theatre is easy to explain, so we start there, really.”
Stone recently revealed to her that when her Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos is happy with an actor’s take he’ll assiduously avoid praise and simply say, “That’s enough of that.” Mulligan hoots again. “I love that,” she says. “That’s f***ing great. That’s enough of that.”
She in turn reveals that Fennell has an entirely different, if just as eccentric approach. “Emerald will go, ‘Oscars for everyone!’ And then we move on. That’s her version of ‘That’s enough of that.’ ‘Oscars for everyone!’” She chuckles again, and gives her head a little shake. Oscars for everyone indeed.
Maestro is on Netflix. Saltburn is on Prime Video. The Baftas are broadcast on BBC1 on February 18
There’s something about Carey . . . from Doctor Who to Hollywood
Pride & Prejudice 2005, buy/rent
A 20-year-old Mulligan made her debut as the boisterous and flirty Kitty Bennet, all dimples and ringlets, in Joe Wright’s lush adaptation of the Jane Austen novel. Encouraged to audition for the role by Julian Fellowes, she joined co-stars Keira Knightley and Rosamund Pike; all have graduated to bigger things.
Northanger Abbey 2007, Britbox
Mulligan continued her costume drama run with a role in Andrew Davies’s Jane Austen romp. As the over-confident but naive Isabella Thorpe, it was an early chance to prove her range.
Doctor Who 2007, iPlayer
Whovians will recall Mulligan’s short-lived but memorable turn as Sally Sparrow, the Doctor’s aide in the chilling episode Blink. Shielding from the terrifying Weeping Angels in a nightmarish game of grandmother’s footsteps, she stole the show from David Tennant’s Time Lord.
An Education 2009, Disney+
Mulligan shone in Lone Scherfig’s coming-of-age story, based on the journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir, about a schoolgirl who falls for a charming conman (Peter Sarsgaard). At just 23, she perfectly caught the innocence and borrowed sophistication of a girl on the brink of womanhood. Mulligan rightly earned her first Oscar nod.
The Great Gatsby 2013, buy/rent
Baz Luhrmann’s bombastic, razzle-dazzle take on F Scott Fitzgerald is grounded largely thanks to Mulligan’s “beautiful little fool”, Daisy Buchanan. Vulnerable yet narcissistic, her take was more compelling than Mia Farrow’s in the original 1974 version.
Shame 2011, buy/rent
Steve McQueen’s exquisitely shot, relentless film was uncompromising in its depiction of sex addiction. Michael Fassbender starred as the white-collar sex addict, while Mulligan was excellent as his manic and bruised sister.
Wildlife 2018, Prime Video
Somehow the actress missed an Oscar nod for her turn in this impressive directorial debut from Paul Dano. In the story of a family in crisis, Mulligan excelled as a raging housewife and mother, abandoned by her husband.
Promising Young Woman 2020, Sky/Now
In Emerald Fennell’s punchy debut, Mulligan triumphed as a devious sociopath and medical school drop-out, who is traumatised by the assault of her best friend. This was a chameleonic performance, filled with dry wit, anger and pain.
She Said 2022, Sky/Now
A love letter to the power of journalism in which Mulligan was the cynical Megan Twohey, a New York Times journalist on a mission to take down Harvey Weinstein. Her performance, opposite Zoe Kazan, was subtle yet assured, and the highlight of this powerful drama.
Jake Helm
