INTERVIEW BY HANNAH WOODHEAD ILLUSTRATION AND TYPE BY LAURÈNE BOGLIOSHE’S WORKED WITH SOME OF THE BIGGEST DIRECTORS IN THE WORLD,
BUT CAREY MULLIGAN IS INTO TAKING RISKS, AND HER ROLE AS CASSIE
THOMAS MIGHT JUST BE HER BIGGEST ONE YET.
’ve never been in a film people might actually
see before,” Carey Mulligan says with a knowing
grin. It’s not quite true, given that she burst onto
the scene a decade ago when her role as a lovestruck
teenage girl in An Education garnered a Best Actress Oscar
nomination, but it’s a joke not without merit. In the years
since, Mulligan has opted for a rare selectivity with her
roles, choosing to work mostly on smaller, arty titles. She’s
racked up an impressive CV, with highlights such as the
glowering songstress Jean in the Coen Brothers’ Inside
Llewyn Davis and messy mother Jeanette in Paul Dano’s
Wildlife. Her role as Cassie Thomas in Promising Young
Woman fits alongside her repertoire of complex female
characters while offering audiences a chance to see her in
a whole new light.
LWLies: A lot of the roles you’ve played are women
that are dealing in some way with the bullshit of the
patriarchy. Would you say that’s a fair assessment?
Mulligan: Yeah, I guess so – I mean, it’s not like I pick up a
script and think, ‘Ah, I really hope I can attack the man with
this one,’ but I guess those probably are the parts that are
interesting. There seems to have been an improvement,
but in the 15 years I’ve been doing this, there have been
a lot of pointless female characters. And I haven’t worked
a huge amount. I’ve not been making four films a year, so
I’ve waited for the parts that have had something to say. I
guess, in retrospect, a lot of them are kicking back a little bit.There’s a sense that you’re quite selective about the
parts. What are you looking for when you’re reading
a script? I’m trying to not do the same thing twice. I’m
trying to do something that feels new and challenging. I’ve
talked about this before, but back when I went to Sundance
with An Education, I thought that I was going to get fired
from the acting world, and then that film went down well
and it completely changed my career. I had a lunch with
my agent, who’s been my agent since I was 18, and she
said: ‘You’re in a moment now to be quite choosy, which
is a rare thing, and you’re lucky to be in it, so try not to say
yes to anything unless you can’t bear the idea of anyone
else doing it.’ So that’s been my litmus test for everything
since then. If I can imagine someone else doing it, and
going to the cinema and seeing another actress playing the
role and that sitting well with me, then I say no. So when
I read Promising Young Woman I was like [gasps] ‘First of“I
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