From her meticulous preparation for Broadway’s Skylight to learning to ride for the sweepingly romantic Far from the Madding Crowd, Carey Mulligan never holds back.
Fresh from a standing ovation, Carey Mulligan sits in her Broadway dressing room, one leg tucked under the other, hair pinned back from her face, her hands almost consumed by a long pale-blue sweater. “Today was a good show,” she says with a smile. “Yesterday I didn’t feel as good about it, but today I liked.”
She is surrounded by flowers (“I got flowers from Helen Mirren, which I thought was the nicest thing ever!” she says) and jars of Marmite sent by well-wishers concerned that she might get homesick. They needn’t have worried. “I’ve always felt better in New York, doing theater,” she says. “I think because there’s no one I know in the audience—or I can believe that more comfortably than I can in London.” On the mirror behind her—written, for lack of lipstick, in Laura Mercier eyeliner—are three lines of poetry designed to embolden her: “These are our days. Walk them. Fear nothing.”
It’s the first weekend of previews for David Hare’s Skylight, which runs through June, a play about a pair of former lovers who meet again after the woman they betrayed has died. Set in a single room over 24 hours, its extremes of emotion, precision-timed dialogue, and highly choreographed movements make it challenging to perform, and all the more searing for its confinement. Its initial production 20 years ago at one time costarred Bill Nighy, as does this one, which was performed in London’s West End last year and is directed by Stephen Daldry. Mulligan, best known for her roles in such films as The Great Gatsby and Inside Llewyn Davis, has been so selective about her stage work that her gift for it is something of an industry secret. Eight years ago, she was a dazzling Nina in Chekhov’s The Seagull. David Hare was so bowled over by her performance that he now says she’s “The One. If I were starting a National Theatre,” he explains, “with an acting company, like Olivier had, I’d start around her.” Nighy describes her as “an assassin” before elaborating: “She’s dead-on, she’s immaculate, she’s impeccable.”
Carey Mulligan knows the secret to being a true New Yorker:
As _Skylight’_s Tom, Nighy plays a charismatic restaurateur, extravagant, mannered, and relentlessly funny. Kyra, meanwhile, is a dowdy and preoccupied schoolteacher, and in Mulligan’s interpretation emerges as the play’s revelation and human core. She is articulate, determined, wry, and raw; she may be the least fake thing you’ll ever see on a stage. “What’s great about Carey is that it never looks like she’s acting,” says Daldry. “She’s so truthful, and so real, and therefore so distressing. It’s unique.”
I first met Mulligan a few weeks earlier, at a pub in North London. She used to live nearby, and we’d arranged to go for a walk on Hampstead Heath. It was a lovely, easygoing afternoon, yet there was something about her that seemed to wrong-foot the very notion of an interview. She wasn’t guarded, exactly—in fact, she answered every question very openly, and when she laughed she could sound like a little girl. But she had a level of composure that was startling: She was devoid of frivolity; she didn’t spill; she was effortlessly self-contained. (Her friend Sienna Miller would later tell me that even she finds this quality in Carey “intimidating: She has a certain seriousness. She’s very good at holding stuff back.”) It was only afterward that I recognized this inscrutable aspect as a key to her great performances as well. As Hare puts it, her “inner life seems so deep that you can’t quite get at it. That’s really what the great ones have.”
If you’d seen Mulligan in the BBC adaptation of Bleak House or in the movie Pride & Prejudice ten years ago, you’d have noticed how engaging she was, and how sweet, but you might not have foreseen the suicidal darkness of her peroxide-blonde singer in Shame, the trouble behind the eyes of her Daisy Buchanan, or the hilarious spitting fury of her Coen-brothers folk artist. Her breakthrough came with An Education (2009), in which she played a sixties schoolgirl willingly led astray by a worldly older man, and the miracle of that film was that she seemed like an ordinary girl aspiring to glamour, rather than an actress in disguise. With any given performance, she bracingly makes you wonder: What will Carey Mulligan do next?
Though those early adaptations gave her an aversion to the costume-drama route so inevitable for British actresses, she is about to appear in a film version of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd. But it is the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s version: a powerful and perverse rendition, in which her costumes are so elaborate as to border on the fetishistic, her tiny waist cinched even smaller by her corset. As Bathsheba Everdene—a woman ahead of her time, who inherits her uncle’s estate—Mulligan is both elfin and severe, commanding and fragile, quicksilver opposite the solid and sensual Matthias Schoenaerts, playing Gabriel Oak. “There’s a tender strength that she has,” Schoenaerts says of his costar. “A gentleness and a softness but an extreme force that comes with it.” The whole film appears to be built on the possibilities suggested by Mulligan’s face, which is full of thought and mischief and defiance.
For Mulligan, familiarity is counterproductive. “I have always felt that the less people know about me, the better,” she says. “The more similar you look job to job, the more they relate to you from your previous roles.” She smiles with a touch of self-mockery. “That’s why I’ve done loads of really stupid things to my hair in the past to try to not look the same.”
The actresses she most admires are those who make bold choices. “My biggest insecurity is that I’m apathetic or passive,” she explains. “So: Kate Winslet or Cate Blanchett or Tilda Swinton—every time I watch them on-screen, they’re just nailing it. They’re very naturalistic but very strong.” Her biggest inspiration, however, is Marion Cotillard, and her reasoning offers a fairly explicit template. “She’s consistently incredible,” Mulligan enthuses. “She does really cool films and doesn’t engage with the stupid side of it. And she’s private—I don’t know anything about her, and I quite like that.”
Mulligan’s marriage to the pop star Marcus Mumford makes privacy a little tricky, but she says she doesn’t get stopped in the street and tells a story about her own invisibility. Last year, a friend sent her a much-syndicated newspaper photo in which she had been “spotted” on the London Underground while attempting to remain incognito. “Carey Mulligan Tried to Take the Tube Without Being Noticed, and Failed,” ran one accusatory headline, accompanied by a picture of a woman wearing a big hat and scarf, her face looking down at an iPhone. “It wasn’t me!” Mulligan says, laughing, then wrinkles her nose. “The weird thing is, she didn’t really look much like me.”
As she says all this, I notice that her familiar gamine face is also oddly changeable. It’s not hard to imagine a Woody Allen–like scenario in which the random person on the Tube is mistaken for her, while the real Carey Mulligan is sitting in the neighboring seat, entirely unrecognized.
Our walk takes us down to Highgate village, past the building where she lived when she first moved to the city at the age of eighteen. She remembers that time with great fondness, pointing up at what was once her window. Before we cut across Waterlow Park, we pick up some lunch from a deli and walk in the cold, carrying paper cups of lentil soup.
In truth, she always thought she’d settle here, but she and Mumford live in West London because it’s easier to get from there to the farmhouse they own in Devon. They have a dog, a cocker spaniel called Rambo. (“Rimbaud as in the poet?” I ask because we have been talking about the poetry she likes to read before going onstage. “No,” Mulligan replies with a smile, “Rambo as in Sylvester Stallone.”)
“I like waking up in the morning and putting on whatever’s by the side of my bed, and putting on Wellington boots and walking up a steep hill. And not wearing any makeup,” she says. “When you’re working, everything’s so busy and so aesthetic. When all of that angst isn’t on you, you’re just kind of a better person—more focused on other people rather than worrying about yourself.” Her old friend the actor and former model Jamie Dornan says that “the country is a good representation of who Carey is. You can just enjoy life the way it’s meant to be, with people who love you.”
Mulligan and Mumford married on a farm in Somerset in 2012. They first met when Mulligan was twelve—she doesn’t like to dwell on how, but rumor has it they went to the same Christian youth camp as children and remained pen pals. Mumford’s father, who is a leader, with Mumford’s mother, of an evangelical branch of the Christian church, officiated at the ceremony. The bride wore Prada—as did the bridesmaids—and the whole occasion, as Sienna Miller recalls, was “full of love, like you hope a wedding would be.”
Miller’s boyfriend, Tom Sturridge, who plays the dashing Sergeant Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd, has known Mulligan since they were both eighteen. “One of the first things I think about Carey is how I feel when I’m in their presence,” Sturridge says of her relationship with Mumford. “It’s a very special thing. It’s not often talked about what a wonderful feeling it is to see someone that you care about love and be loved.”
Mulligan herself is loath to talk about Mumford in public. She laughs when I ask how she’s enjoying married life—presumably because both she and I know she won’t say much about it. She says they manage to balance their respective working schedules—“like anyone, you try and split your time evenly”—and that Mumford will be with her in New York on and off. She tells me they are looking forward to having a family and adds, quietly and touchingly, that “Marcus is the only thing that’s mine that I can keep totally away, so I try to.”
Miller points out that “they both come from very solid families and have a real sense of the life they want to live.” She says one of the things she loves most about the couple is “their normalcy. They have chickens and a dog, and roasts and friends, jams by campfires. It’s sort of idyllic. Marcus can headline Glastonbury and Carey can be nominated for however many Oscars, and then they come back to their farm, and they’re in big woolly jumpers and funny hats, raising piglets. It’s an amazing balance they’ve managed to strike. I can’t wait for a little baby to come along.”
Through the cavernous main hall of the Houses of Parliament—past Big Ben, up a set of stone steps, and under a vaulted ceiling carved with angels—is a small room called the Inter-Parliamentary Union Room. It is late February, a couple of days after our walk on Hampstead Heath, and a crowd of politicians has gathered to hear about the NGO War Child UK’s latest report on children in armed conflict. As a member of a four-person panel, Mulligan is due to give a brief speech about her recent experiences with the organization in Jordan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
She had told me she’d be nervous, and I take this to be mainly modesty until I see her arrive, like a belated breeze, in the airless room. She looks like someone else: a lawyer, perhaps—or at any rate someone a good ten years older than the woman I have just spent time with. She is wearing a loose double-breasted jacket in Prince of Wales check (Stella McCartney, she tells me later), studded black loafers, and demure dark trousers. Her hair is curled a little at the ends, and as she waits for her turn to speak she has a self-consciously professional way of twisting it into a ponytail and letting it go at the nape of her neck. She fiddles with the small gold cross on her necklace. There is just no way for her to do this, I realize, except by playing it as a part. In this scene, a well-known actress named Carey Mulligan speaks to Members of Parliament. (The last time she was here, she was acting, playing the protesting woman at the heart of Sarah Gavron’s forthcoming film Suffragette.)
“Gosh, this is a scary room,” she says as she stands up from her green leather chair. A bell rings distractingly—the call for MPs in another part of the building to vote. She plows on. “I’m an actress, so I have to read from a script.” And in saying that, in picking up the paper on which she’s written her prepared remarks, she becomes winningly herself: full of poise, with an edge of sincere anxiety.
Mulligan tells the assembled crowd about her brother, Owain, a soldier: When he was deployed in Afghanistan, he heard that the Taliban had shut down a girls’ school by poisoning a well; he raised money for the school to reopen and found War Child to be the only charity that would help without keeping a percentage of the cash.
Mulligan is affectionately irritated by her brother’s good deeds and his intelligence. (He learned Pashto and Dari and worked as an interpreter.) He is two years older than she, and they are, she says, very close. Because their father was a manager of high-end hotels, they moved around, from England to Germany and back—German was Mulligan’s first language—and they lived in apartments at the top of hotels.
Despite her many changes of school, it was the move to middle school without her best friend that upset her most. Where other kids would be obliged to get over such a separation, Mulligan tried it for a while, then begged her parents to send her to the same Catholic boarding school as Celia, who welcomed her with open arms. “I wasn’t a millionaire’s daughter, and I didn’t hang out in Sloane Street,” Mulligan explains of her time there. “But there was a slightly less cool group that was a nice group.” Celia and other girls she met at school remain her closest friends.
When I ask Mulligan what she would do if she weren’t an actress, she looks baffled. “I can’t imagine not acting,” she says. “But that’s been the case since I was thirteen.” She’s had no reason to consider a plan B, of course. But more than that, she has always been determined to act. She first went on stage as a small child in Düsseldorf, in her school production of The King and I. She played one of the king’s children, her blonde hair dyed black for the purpose. At convent school in England, she slogged away for years in the Easter Cantata until she was finally cast as Jesus. And by the time she was about fourteen, she realized, “The musical-theater dream’s probably going to die, but I can do the straight stuff.” She adds drily: “It was crushing, but I got through it.”
Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes once gave a talk at her school, and she asked him for advice on becoming an actress. He put her off, saying the profession was “the thief of lives,” but Mulligan insisted: As soon as she left school she wrote him a letter, and Fellowes invited her for dinner. She explained that her ambition to act had no precedent in her family, and Fellowes and his wife, Emma, impressed by her pluck, made a few calls, one of which led her to be cast opposite Keira Knightley in Pride & Prejudice. Mulligan had tried to get into drama school and been rejected, but from then on, she was propelled by her talent—as well as her imaginative decisions.
“Given the choice, I’d rather not play accessories,” she explains. “And waiting for the non-girlfriend/wife thing usually takes a decent amount of time.” Hence the long periods she has taken off work—nine months here, eighteen months there. Playing Nina in The Seagull was so hard to top, she says, that she fell on _Skylight’_s Kyra with tremendous appetite. Theater, she believes, offers better roles for women as they age, and for Mulligan, who has often played characters much younger than herself and looks forward to being older, “that’s sort of exciting.”
This month, while she’s on Broadway, she will turn 30. “It does feel like so much has changed,” she reflects. “When I was younger, I used to strongly feel that I didn’t know myself. I was drawn to people who were very confident. And I think through my work, I’ve probably figured that out.”
She thrives on challenge. For Far from the Madding Crowd, Mulligan had to learn to ride. Some of the film’s most beautiful sequences focus on her on horseback. But two weeks into filming, she was badly thrown off a horse. She now believes that she had a concussion for the rest of the production, but at the time she carried on. She was shooting the very last, intensely romantic scene with Schoenaerts, and fainted. “Matthias thought I was acting,” she says, laughing. “I dropped to my knees, then sort of keeled over to the side. It’s quite hard to faint in a corset.”
On Broadway, Mulligan prepares rigorously for each performance, arriving two and a half hours early and turning her two phones to airplane mode so she can’t be reached. “I get in at 5:30, eat, sleep from 6:00 to 6:30, get up, have a shower, do my hair and makeup, warm up onstage for half an hour, come back up here, dress, mic, and then on,” she says as we sit in her dressing room. “It’s like a system. And I have to do it.”
“There’s a defiant way of doing things on her own terms,” says David Hare. “She’s absolutely certain about what jobs she wants to do and what jobs she doesn’t. She trusts her own judgment, which, in an insecure profession, is a fabulous thing.”
Mulligan’s own view of being an actress is that “you should make important films or tell important stories. I do think the goal has to be to try and find something that will be remembered in a long time. Because otherwise, if you’re not aiming to do your best, there’s no point.” And, she says, “if it all goes wrong, I’ll just open a fudge shop in Devon.”