The role Carey Mulligan never thought she’d play: “They’ll never let me play that”
What character archetype would we associate with Carey Mulligan, to make one understand why there was one role she thought she would never get? There is often something nurturing about her performances, but her filmography contains many stones to be turned over.
Mulligan shot to fame for 2009’s An Education, for which she merited an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Lead Actress.’ The coming-of-age drama follows an aspiring Oxford attendee in 1960s suburban London, who falls into a relationship with an older man.
In the next few years, Mulligan would land two more parts characterised by a kind of naivete: first, 2010’s Never Let Me Go, a strange tragedy surrounded by sci-fi implications, but which is fundamentally only about the lasting, nebulous impact a group of school friends have had on each other.
2013 saw Mulligan stepping into the role of the ever-wistful and spoiled Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby—though Mulligan has regrets about her performance as Daisy. Mulligan’s credits from the early 2010s also include Drive, Inside Llewyn Davis, Far from the Maddening Crowd, and Suffragette. She portrays a depressed, isolated wife in 2017’s Mudbound, a determined journalist in 2022’s She Said, and a wayward, unwelcome guest in 2023’s Saltburn.
I would be remiss not to talk about Mulligan’s other two Oscar nominations. 2020, an unsatisfying Oscars year if there ever was one, saw her leading Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman. Mulligan plays shrewd Cassandra, who executes revenge against everyone who made it possible for a man to get away with sexually assaulting her friend. Cassie’s viciousness is mixed with hurt and longing, though the narrative’s handling of sensitive subject matter was not universally well-received.
Then Mulligan was condunctor Leanord Bernstein’s wife Felicia Montealegre in 2023’s Maestro, a part of many conflicted emotions, even if it was in the most obvious Oscar bait ever. Really, there is no reason to believe that Mulligan can’t do anything she puts her mind to, subverting what people have come to expect in understated ways. But determined though she was to get it, Mulligan once doubted she would win another role vital to her career in 2011’s Shame.
Mulligan shared (via NME) that when she read the script, “I thought, ‘They’ll never let me play that’. I’ve been in An Education and Never Let Me Go. She’s so far removed from anything I’ve ever done.” The woman who ended up being Mulligan’s character after all is Sissy, the hell-raising sister of Michael Fassbender’s sex addict protagonist Brandon. Mulligan said about Sissy, “She was really exciting. Getting to play an extrovert and exhibitionist was a relief.”
When Mulligan met with writer-director Steven McQueen, she had to fight for a proper conversation, sharing, “Steven kept trying to leave the meeting, and I sat him back on his chair and said, ‘What do I need to do to get this job?’ I told him I felt a passionate desire to play the part.” The NC-17-rated feature was met with largely positive reviews from critics who praised the performances for how they explore the main characters’ psychological disorders.
Mulligan is returning to a more lighthearted, comforting role soon, as she is set to play Digory Kirke’s mother in Greta Gerwig’s The Chronicles of Narnia. Likely to have more of a presence than she does in the source material, it will remind audiences of the kind of thoughtful, tragic, and innocent parts Mulligan often plays, but one should never forget that she will fight for the darker fare she knows she can deftly pull off.
