“I wasn’t very good”: the actor who refused to be Carey Mulligan’s mentor
Actors don’t really come any better than Carey Mulligan, who, almost every time that she makes a movie, seems to illustrate another side to her, several more strings to several more bows, and she can evidently take on almost any conceivable genre of film without missing a step.
The last five or six years have illustrated this perfectly; there was Emerald Fennell’s twisty debut Promising Young Woman in 2020 that won her a ‘Best Actress’ nod at the Oscars, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro three years later (another Academy Award nomination) and last year she was note-perfect in the gentle but brilliant comedy The Ballad of Wallis Island.
Three completely different styles of movie, three outstanding performances from Mulligan, who, let’s not forget, was already putting in those kinds of shifts as far back as 2009 for her first Academy Award-nominated role in An Education, the Nick Hornby coming-of-age drama she starred in opposite Peter Sarsgaard.
Less than two years later, she lent another performance for the ages to Steve McQueen’s Shame alongside Michael Fassbender, and then two years after that, she was in the Coen brothers’ absolute masterpiece Inside Llewyn Davis, a kind of trial run for the Wallis Island movie she would make more than a decade later.
By that point, everyone was aware that the British actor was a genuine, generational talent, but it didn’t come easy, and it didn’t come without some considerable self-reflection from Mulligan as a teenager after some dispiriting ‘thanks, but no thanks’ moments in her early acting career.
She recalled those formative years to The Guardian back in 2010, explaining, “I got turned down by Rada, and Central [Drama School], and Drama Centre London. But fair enough, I wasn’t very good. I went in and performed a monologue from [2000 play] 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, who subsequently killed herself. I was 17 years old, this incredibly well-adjusted, happy person. Nothing bad had happened to me. And I was trying to conjure all this pain and drama. So they were like, ‘Who’s this pretentious public-school kid trying to trick us?’ I got a recall at Central, but that’s as close as it came.”
More rejections arrived when she wrote a letter to British acting and directing legend Kenneth Branagh, asking him if he would act as her mentor, something he politely declined. She then wrote another to the Downton Abbey star Julian Fellowes, which was more warmly received, and he arranged an audition for her in the 2005 Joe Wright period drama Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley.
Mulligan got the gig and was off to the races, making several TV shows in a row in Britain, including Dr Who, before her movie career began in earnest, with a role in Johnny Depp’s mob movie Public Enemies, the Wall Street sequel Money Never Sleeps and then in 2013, The Great Gatsby, as one of the leads opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in her highest-grossing movie to date.
That record may well be in danger soon, however, because Mulligan’s next major role is in the Greta Gerwig-directed, big-budget reimagining of CS Lewis’ Narnia, co-starring Daniel Craig, which is due to be released in Imax on November 26th of this year before Netflix grabs hold of it to stream exclusively worldwide on Christmas Day.
