Carey Mulligan has had quite a week. First, she flew from New York to LA for
the premiere of her movie An Education, making her way down the red carpet
in rented dress and high heels. On Sunday, she flew back to New York for the
East Coast premiere — more heels, more dresses, this time fending off
tabloid flashbulbs — before returning to the set of Wall Street 2, in which
she plays Gordon Gekko’s daughter. On Wednesday, she took the evening off to
appear on Late Show with David Letterman, followed by another screening of
An Education, waking up on Thursday with a terrific hangover to endure five
hours in hair and make-up while they dyed her hair red again for Wall Street
2.
“The continuity should be interesting,” she says, ruffling her reddish locks
when we sit down for a late lunch on Friday in the TriBeCa district of
Manhattan. She orders salmon and tucks in, hungrily. “For two months I had
healthy hair, then they whacked a ton of peroxide on it. And I get so
excited, I go, ‘Yeah, yeah, red hair.’ Then I realise it’s going to be red.”
She laughs. “I have to learn how to say no.”
She is a little taller than I expect: a slim 5ft 8in, in a floral skirt,
tights, ballet slippers and a beaten-up leather jacket. She has a pretty,
round face, with a seriously dimpled smile, but the real show stopper is her
voice: rich, low, musical, with just the right amount of posh. If her face
plays a lot younger than her 24 years, her voice plays older — a paradox
that lies at the heart of her performance in An Education, adapted by Nick
Hornby from the journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir about her love affair with
an older, worldlier man while still a schoolgirl in the early 1960s. Since
the film’s debut at the Sundance Festival earlier this year, Mulligan’s
performance has been attracting glowing reviews, comparisons to Audrey
Hepburn and intense Oscar buzz.
Even before Sundance, Warren Beatty called her for a meeting, and when he
found out she had been using the bus to get around Hollywood, he drove her
around himself. “Everyone was, like, ‘What? You don’t drive? That’s crazy.
I’ve never been on the bus my whole life.’ I told them there was a subway.
It goes from Hollywood and Vine to Universal, so you don’t have to go over
the hill. They were, like, ‘There’s a subway?’”
She and Beatty have become firm friends. “He just liked the cut of my jib,”
she says. “He’s like a godfather. I hear stories about a completely
different generation. It’s just wild. He has the best stories of anybody
I’ve ever met.” In another era, the news that a young actress had been
befriended by Beatty would have been a clear signal to her family and
friends to lash her to the nearest heavy object and barricade the windows.
It says something for Mulligan’s charm that the story instead comes off like
the oldest fairy tale in the book: the fresh face who comes to town and
turns the place upside down.
“It became apparent at Sundance that Carey’s life was about to change in the
course of a single weekend,” Hornby says. “Within 24 hours, she was being
described as ‘the Sundance It girl’, ‘the new Hepburn’. It was exciting,
like something from another era, almost. It’s been interesting seeing how
undemocratic the whole process is. You assume it’s like voting. Someone
appears in a movie, and if enough people go to see it, that person gets to
be in another movie. It’s more like betting. Everybody makes a bet, then a
bunch of other people make an even bigger bet, then all bets are off.”
Mulligan does a good impression of a girl keeping a level head while all
around her are losing theirs — just. When Penelope Cruz came over and
introduced herself at Sundance, she found herself on the verge of tears: “I
had no idea why. I just felt blown away. I’ve never reacted like that
before. Ever.” During her Letterman interview, however, a rite of passage
that has reduced many young actresses to jelly, she handled herself with
more aplomb than her host. “It wasn’t so scary,” she says, chalking up
another first. Only the Hepburn comparisons stop her in her tracks. “It’s
flattering, but a little freaky,” she says. “It’s Audrey Hepburn. She’s,
like, a goddess. She didn’t have Shrek cheeks and a wonky mouth. My friends
who were at school with me came out to New York for the premiere of An
Education. And everyone got really drunk, except me. So it’s 2am, and my
best friend, Soph, was, like” — she lowers her voice to a conspiratorial
whisper — “‘Carey, this is so weeeird. Don’t you think this is weeeird?’
Yes. It’s really weird. I’m wearing this studded Prada going-to-war dress
and I look like Vivienne Westwood.”
Actually, if you want to compare her to any actress, it’s the young Shirley
MacLaine, who lit up The Trouble With Harry and The Apartment with her
mixture of sprightly mischief and wise-old-soul common sense. There’s
something of the same balance of effervescence and sanguinity to Mulligan.
“I’ve not been doing this for a long time, but it has been 5½ years...” she
points out. “And I’ve spent the past two years going back and forth from LA
a lot. I understand it. I do see that this buzz thing is part of the
business.”
Her upbringing was a nice blend of the peripatetic and the secure. Her father
is a retired hotel manager, and between the ages of three and eight, she
lived in a succession of hotels — first in Mayfair, then Hyde Park Corner,
then two in Germany — the perfect place to observe the vagaries of your
fellow human beings, she says. She used to perch in the laundry trolley,
peeking out from behind the sheets. “A lot of people commit suicide in
hotels,” she says. “Because there’s nothing around you to remind you of your
life or reasons not to kill yourself. My dad had to deal with a lot of that,
not me — they weren’t, like, ‘Hey, room 219’s just offed themselves, send
the kid.’ It all felt normal. It was weirder when we lived in a house and
got real keys to let ourselves in with. I was, like, ‘Why don’t we just
swipe?’”
Initially, her parents were wary of the 15-year-old Mulligan’s stated ambition
to be an actress. All she had was a bunch of school plays under her belt —
mostly the boys’ parts. “I would have been really against it, too,” she
says. When she was 17, she secretly used three of the places on her Ucas
form to apply to drama school, a ruse that lasted for six months until her
mother went online: “I got busted.” She got a job in a pub and applied
again, this time getting into Reading University, still finagling like mad
to get acting work. When she finally did land a role — as Kitty, in Pride &
Prejudice — her parents didn’t believe her. “I told them, ‘So, I’m going to
be in this film with Judi Dench’, and they thought I’d made the whole thing
up.”
Parts began to come her way — the BBC’s Bleak House, The Hypochondriac at the
Almeida, ITV’s Trial & Retribution (“murdered child, thrown down
the stairs, lots of blood”) and Nina in Chekhov’s The Seagull, for which she
kept a notebook, charting her character’s inner life. It was just a
“security blanket” at first, to offset her lack of theatrical training —
“You feel like you should have a piece of paper that says you’re allowed to
do it” — but she has kept it up for every part since, including Jenny in An
Education. “The thing that was most challenging to play was that kind of
uber-enthusiasm, while everyone else is being cool and laid-back, and you’re
going mental. I lean towards tragic dramatic characters more. I usually
isolate myself, go off into corners and think terribly hard about what I’m
doing. On this, I was just whizzing around. I loved it.”
It’s a lovely performance — a tossed salad of exuberance, intelligence and
pluck, not words that often go together, smart people being very good at
coming up with 101 reasons to be scared of something, or not to do it. For
Mulligan, being scared is a sign that she is on the right track. This Oliver
Stone film, for instance. “I understood that it would be the biggest thing
I’d ever done. It meant paparazzi on set every day. I knew I’d be entering
another world. Then I thought about it a bit, and went, ‘It’s Oliver Stone,
it’s Wall Street, I’m not saying no.’”
She was right: the tabloids were whipped into their usual lather by her
relationship with her co-star Shia LaBeouf, writing up every meal, every
held hand, every tiff, as if they were lightning bolts from the
Burton-Taylor boudoir. “When we were in LA, I got a little frustrated by the
paparazzi following me on my own,” she says. “I told my brother, and he
said, ‘Dry your eyes, there are worse things in the world.’ Which is true. I
said that to Warren, and he was, like, ‘Yeah, but don’t underplay it. It’s
not that pleasant, either.’ He gave me a pep talk about being known, which
obviously he’s an expert on.”
In Beatty, who now reads scripts for her, and Hornby, in whose basement she
has crashed a number of times, Mulligan would seem to have two of the best
advisers a girl could wish for. “She’s been making all the right choices,”
Hornby says, pointing to her forthcoming roles in a film version of The
Seagull, a Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation, Never Let Me Go, and alongside Susan
Sarandon in The Greatest. “There’s been no rush of blood to the head.” The
only big change has been her decision to settle in New York.
“I love it here,” she says. “I feel more at home here than I do anywhere.” She
loves the laundry and takeouts delivered right to her door; she loves the
lingo and practises saying “jackass”, not “jahkahs”. When I later ask her
how her Friday night shaped up after she left me, she tells me that she got
some sushi and sake with a friend, then got “terribly nervous” and jumped in
a cab up to the cinema where An Education was opening that night. She bought
20 tickets to bump up sales, then watched the first 10 minutes with her
first paying audience.
“It was awesome,” she said.
An Education opens on Oct 30
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