“He kept on trying to leave!”: how Carey Mulligan landed her dream Steve McQueen role
You wouldn’t expect someone like Carey Mulligan, a three-time Academy Award nominee, to have any trouble convincing directors to work with her. Yet there was one filmmaker she repeatedly tried to collaborate with, only for the opportunity to keep slipping through her fingers.
Steve McQueen was the one director Mulligan could never quite pin down, and for years, it seemed as though the collaboration was never going to happen. By 2010, Mulligan had already earned widespread acclaim for Never Let Me Go, having previously appeared in British films such as And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Pride and Prejudice, her screen debut. She knew she had the talent, and she was determined not to let the opportunity to work with McQueen slip away.
The director, who’d made his feature debut in 2008 with Hunger, was working on a rather controversial title for his second project called Shame, a feature about sex addiction. With Michael Fassbender cast in the leading role – his character Brandon consistently seeking out sex, watching hardcore pornography, and masturbating – McQueen needed a strong actor to play his sister, Sissy.
Mulligan was interested, but McQueen was not, and she was sure that it was down to the difference in Sissy, as a character, and those who she was used to playing. “I think the work that anyone has seen from me has been these middle-class, comfortable people or quiet and sensitive types,” she told New York Magazine.
“I haven’t really played anything onscreen over the last couple of years that’s been as extroverted as Sissy. So I don’t think I was the obvious choice for Steve,” Mulligan suggested, and so she had to work extra hard to convince him that she actually did have what it took to play someone a little grittier, someone who stood apart from the roles she’d picked so far.
But she wasn’t averse to a complex story about sex, having played a teenager who gets caught up in a relationship with an older man in An Education – there’s even a scene where she finds herself faced with a banana for practice.
Mulligan knew what she had to do. “I was back at the London Film Festival, and I met him for coffee. And he kept on trying to leave! Finally, I told him, ‘You know, I played Nina in The Seagull a couple of years ago, and I’ve never found a role onscreen that’s been as hard or as interesting or as fun to do,’” she said.
Adding, “And then I read Shame, and I was like, ‘She’s practically related to Nina; they’re like cousins. If I feel the way that I felt when I played Nina, I can play this.’”
Her powers of persuasion clearly worked, and she even expressed her interest in getting a seagull tattoo to honour the play, which she cherished so much. “I got a call a couple of hours later that he was offering me the job, and I think it was only because I told him I was getting a tattoo,” she concluded. “I got the tattoo the following morning.”
