THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT CAREY

Carey Mulligan’s beguiling combination of fragility and drive has seen her progress from low-budget British films to a lavish Hollywood production of The Great Gatsby. She talks to AJESH PATALAY about the ambition that fires her and the relationship with

Carey Mulligan is running late. She sends me a text. “Hi! It’s Carey!” it starts, full of zing. She’s stuck in traffic but on her way, “so sorry–see you soon.” Twenty-five minutes later, still no sign of her. A second text arrives, vexed but upbeat: “This taxi driver is honestly doing the most infuriating things–not far now!” When Mulligan finally arrives at Soho House, where we’ve arranged to meet for breakfast, she is 40 minutes late. She appears in the doorway, zigzags hurriedly across the room to our window table, and greets me in flustered distress.

Amid profuse apology comes her explanation. She would have just taken the Tube, she says, like she normally does. But the past few days she’s not been feeling well; in fact, she’s been unable to hold down food. So she decided to take a taxi. “Then I was like, ‘What am I doing getting a taxi in rush hour?’ And it was a really smelly cab, very smoky. And there was one point when he went round Cavendish Square three times and he wouldn’t take an exit and I was like, ‘Take an exit.’ It just turned into a complete nightmare.” At her wits’ end, Mulligan jumped out and ran the last couple of blocks to keep me from waiting even longer. It’s quite the gesture. How many Oscar-nominated, Bafta-winning actresses would break into a sweat for a complete stranger, let alone a journalist?

But as Mulligan settles herself over a pot of ginger tea, it becomes clear that this 27-year-old isn’t the least bit grand or actressy, despite the drama attending her arrival. She is dressed smartly but unfussily: A navy Twenty8Twelve blazer with a Tory Burch jumper, Helmut Lang trousers, and Marni lace-ups, all in black. Her Balenciaga purse, also black, sits beside her. There’s not a scrap of makeup on her face, and her soft blonde hair, longer than it has been for years, falls forward in mussy wayward strands. “Today is the first day I’ve woken up completely normal,” she says when I ask how she’s feeling. She does look wan and frankly a little frail. “Yesterday I was like, ‘I’m fine,’ and then I started eating and I was like—.” She discreetly mimes a heave.

This immediately rings alarm bells. I can’t help but suspect morning sickness, and not just because pregnancy rumours have previously surfaced on the Internet—admittedly in tandem with other spurious reports, including one that misidentified a girl in Lycra running shorts as her, under the headline ‘Mulligan looks unrecognisable.’ (“She looked great,” Mulligan says, “the most amazing thighs; so I was like, ‘I’ll take that.’”) Since she married the musician Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons in April 2012, there’s been a succession of paparazzi shots showing the couple in marital bliss. A baby rumour might seem the logical next step in the tabloid version of their lives. “Oh, of course,” she says, rolling her eyes when I finally broach the subject. “I had a meeting with some producers in L.A. and they actually congratulated me on my baby.” She laughs and sips her tea, leaving me to marvel at her blithe non-denial.

I don’t have the heart to press the matter, because by this point Mulligan has made herself so pleasantly amenable. She is eager to engage, down-to-earth, even low-key. It doesn’t surprise me that she rarely gets recognised, or that when she is stopped, passers-by tend to mistake her for a member of their family. “They ask me if I’m related to their aunt, something I quite like,” she says. “No one ever thinks you’re you.” In the past she has described her looks as “forgettable”: The round face, button nose, and dimpled cheeks that seem to embody girlishness; all in marked contrast to her voice, deep and melodious like a cello, more suggestive of a woman twice her age.

That combination perfectly suited Mulligan’s breakthrough role in An Education as Jenny Mellor, the naive but spirited 1960s school girl desperate to escape the conventional moulds that others had in store for her. Mulligan’s best performances since have showcased the extraordinary translucence she has as an actress, able to project so much with so little. Even in her least demonstrative roles, such as the quietly despairing Kathy in

Never Let Me Go or the sweetly restrained Irene in Drive, the viewer divines a torrent of emotion coursing beneath the surface.

She had a “low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth...” F Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby could have been written of Mulligan, who played the role of Daisy in Baz Luhrmann’s 3D film version, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, the mysterious tycoon who follows her from Louisville to Long Island in order to win her back. “Daisy was difficult to work out,” says Mulligan, “but so fun to play.” Having been cast in October 2010, a year before shooting began in Sydney, Mulligan had plenty of time to excavate the character, widely thought to be an amalgam of two women from Fitzgerald’s life, his wife Zelda and a debutante he had a relationship with before Zelda, called Ginevra King. Mulligan took a road trip to Princeton to examine the Fitzgerald archives and attended a rehearsal week in New York, where the cast was given huge research folders on the 1920s and iPods containing music and documentary clips. “Baz also gave me about seven biographies of Zelda and a stack of love letters from Ginevra,” says

“Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth...”

Mulligan. “You can so easily see where Fitzgerald has taken Daisy from. Just the way Zelda and Ginevra wrote—there were lines we stole for the script.”

To prepare for any role, Mulligan keeps a notebook teeming with visual triggers. Her notebook for Gatsby was less pictorial than usual. “We already had so many visual references. If you walked into the makeup room, it was floor-to-ceiling pictures of 1920s flapper girls. Baz had a little house on the lot which he operated out of. You walked in and the walls were covered with architectural and historical drawings.” Mulligan’s Gatsby notebook was filled with quotations from Zelda and Ginevra, notes on conversations with Luhrmann, and the occasional billetdoux from her “sweet” co-star: “Leo had given me a present, something his assistant had gotten him, some health food I thought was so cool. He’d left it in my dressing room and written a note, ‘Dear Daisy...’ signed off ‘Gatsby’, and he’d drawn daisies on it.” She frowns. “That makes him sound so... But he’s a real man,” she adds, laughing.

Knowing that Mulligan was once a huge fan of Titanic, I ask about DiCaprio. “Well, he wasn’t my pin-up,” she says, “but he was for a lot of my girlfriends.” Who was her pin-up? “Michael Schumacher. I used to watch Formula 1 with my dad when I was little. I didn’t really have actors or musicians as idols in that respect.” She circles back: “When I did the audition with Leo in New York I walked away grinning. Just the idea that if I never got any further, I had just spent an hour-and-a-half acting with Leonardo DiCaprio.” She tells the story of him jumping about in her audition, playing three different roles, and improvising off-camera. “Most people would just sit and read the script... I’m his biggest fan.”

One of the major challenges for Mulligan was “playing someone who is written to be desirable. I’d never played that, a character who ensnares people that easily, with abandon.” For someone who once said she “never felt like a sexy person”, you can imagine the leap. She slimmed down with Pilates to fit the Twenties dresses created by Miuccia Prada and costume designer Catherine Martin. Otherwise, she was grateful to submit to Luhrmann’s Svengali-like touch. “Baz would come into every single makeup test, take photos from 17 different angles, and decide everything. He chose which way my hair was parted. He was there when they cut my wig to the exact length he wanted. I just handed that over to him.’

Mulligan feels more anxious now, partly out of fear of t he Gatsby traditionalists (“people are so easily offended”), and partly because this is the biggest film of her career, and with that comes the added pressure of promotion. The day before we meet, it has been announced that Gatsby will open the Cannes Film Festival. ‘That is crazy pressure,” Mulligan says. “My agent said last night that it’s actually quite empty at Cannes right at the beginning—” I must look surprised by this, because she suddenly breaks off. “Is that not true ? I bet you he’s just trying to make me feel better... I’m terrified. I used to cry when I got to the end of red carpets. It would build up as I was standing there. I’d be at the first bank of photographers, then move to the next and everyone would be shouting, “No, no, over here.” By the end my publicist would have to wipe the tears away from under my eyes.”

The weight of expectation has always pressed heavily on Mulligan. Her earliest (“terrible”) memory from the age of five, after her hotel-manager father had moved the family to Düsseldorf, is of a boy from her mixed international school leaving a Valentine on her desk. “I was so embarrassed. Everybody could see it was there. I took it, ripped it up and threw it down the drain in the courtyard. Then I felt so guilty.” Not being kind was cause for self-castigation. Her childhood was generally happy and she had lots of “good influences”, including her parents and older brother Owain, who excelled at school, got a double first at Oxford, and went on to join the army. But, says Mulligan, “I don’t know if I was that good.” She recalls once snapping at a girl at her school sports day and being “completely mortified by how awful I’d been”.

The guilt perhaps sprang from her religious upbringing (she used to attend church every week when she was younger). In her early teens, she went to a church summer camp with her best friend, Celia (who now works for a Catholic charity and remains close to Mulligan). “I did what she did. I always had a faith and I always thought of myself as a Christian. But I never became a Catholic. She suggested we go to this camp, so we went. It was quite innocent, good fun.” Mulligan sees its influence in some other “weirdest” teenage behaviour, such as putting up posters of decayed lungs at Woldingham, the girls’ boarding school in Surrey where she was enrolled at 14 when her family moved to Vienna. “I thought smoking was the worst thing so I plastered these pictures all over the notice board to advise people against it. People just laughed at me. Maybe they hated me, I don’t know. I put up this thing about bulimia too, because there were a couple of bulimics in our year.”

If those early years were underscored by anxiety (“I would stay up at night worrying about everything. I was really sensitive”), acting was the one constant at consecutive schools that didn’t make her nervous. It started with a production of

The King and I when she was six. ‘“It was really intense. All the blonde kids had their hair dyed. We looked very sweet.” By 15, Mulligan was serious about acting and begged her parents to send her to a performing arts school. They refused. So at 17 she “rebelled for the first time in [her] life”, and applied to three drama schools in secret. All three turned her down. When no university acceptance letters arrived, her mother insisted on checking her UCAS form online. “All hell broke loose. By that point I couldn’t lie so I gave her the UCAS password, left a note saying ‘I’m sorry’, and went to my church at the end of the street and sat outside crying for 45 minutes. Then I walked home and she was so disappointed because I had just lied my arse off for a good six months.”

“Leo left me a gift and wrote me a note, ‘Dear Daisy...’ signed off ‘Gatsby’, and he’d drawn daisies on it.”

Through sheer tenacity and with a helping hand from actor Julian Fellowes, who had once spoken at her school, Mulligan secured herself an audition for Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice and made her professional debut as Kitty Bennet alongside Keira Knightley and Judi Dench. TV parts followed, but it was being cast as Nina in Ian Rickson’s 2007 revival of The Seagulls at the Royal Court and then on Broadway that made a lasting impression on her and with the critics. “She captures the raw hunger within Nina’s ambition, the ravening vitality as well as vulnerability,” judged The New York Times.

“That sort of contrast in a performer is very special,” says Rickson. “The fragility can beckon an audience in, while the robust determination can drive a character towards their quest. That part was so important for Carey, because the transference of character into actor was so dynamic. Nina is determined to be an actress and yet ends up valuing the deeper human qualities of endurance and faith. Sometimes actors attract the parts they play to allow them to grow and develop survival skills.” The wish to endure has informed Mulligan’s career choices ever since. She won’t pursue a role unless it marks a new challenge and she feels passionately about it. “A lot of the things I was offered after An Education were precocious 16-year-olds. The American version of that is the quirky girl in a Ramones T-shirt smoking cigarettes. After Wall Street: Money

Never Sleeps, I stopped working for a year, because that wasn’t the kind of stuff I wanted to do.”

The angst of her early twenties, when she was phoning her agent “several times a day” and would freak out if, say, someone spilt red wine on her carpet, has largely dissipated. “In the last couple of years,” says Mulligan, “I probably feel more clear than I did before.” I can’t help attributing this, at least in part, to her relationship with 26-year-old Mumford, whose Grammy-awardwinning English folk-rock band Mumford & Sons plays to packed stadiums around the world.

She started dating him two years ago but has known him since childhood. Like Tom Buchanan for Daisy in The Great

Gatsby, “there [is] a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position”. For their Somerset wedding, Mulligan asked Miuccia Prada to design her ivory wedding dress. “I have worn a lot of Prada and always loved their clothes. I always felt very comfortable. They were the first designer house that ever lent me anything; I wore Prada to the Oscars. The people who work there are so lovely and really just non-scary fashion people.”

Mulligan won’t talk directly about her husband and politely steers me away: “If that’s OK. I know that’s so boring.” Part of her reticence comes from not wanting to court the wrong attention. “We went to the Brit Awards,” she explains. “We got in the car at the end of the night. Photographers catch you as you’re blinking and it makes you look like you’re drunk. Then the headline is ‘Drunk and tired’. That stuff is awful. Then you think about your family seeing that...” That’s part of the reason she likes getting out of London to “dramatic” places like Dartmoor: “The further out you get, the further away you get from that,” she says. And I really like rural, farmy places. When my parents moved to Vienna they bought a little place in the mountains and we always went walking, so now I like marching through the English countryside.”

The couple’s shared faith is another source of interest. Mulligan’s in-laws are national leaders of t he Vineyard Church, with a “neo-charismatic” evangelical church with it s own burgeoning music scene, from which Marcus Mumford emerged. Religion clearly plays a part in Mulligan’s life (she talks gleefully about singing in the church choir and helping out with the Nativity play). But she seems more inspired by her husband’s creativity and his band’s sense of community than by his faith. “There is something really enviable. A bunch of musicians can get together, start playing music, and make something. There is a bonding familial vibe about it that I am really drawn to.” As an actress she can’t generate work in the same way. “For the first 10 months of this last year off, I was pretty content not working,” says Mulligan.

A bit of actorly tomfoolery might at least distract her from the publicity at Cannes. She recalls filming a montage sequence with DiCaprio when Daisy and Gatsby meet again. “Leo and I were in this car and we had to be grossly involved with one another. There was no sound. Just us doing stuff. We got talking about the 27 Club, the bizarre phenomenon of people who die when they’re 27. So I’m like, ‘James Dean’. And Leo’s like, ‘He’s not in the club. How much do you want to bet on it? If I win, when we get to Cannes’—that was very presumptuous—‘you have to interrupt someone at the press conference and say, I just want to say Leonardo DiCaprio is hands down the finest actor of his generation. If you’re right, I will say it about you.’ Well, I lost. So I assume he’ll hold me to it.”

Mulligan laughs. “All that silliness was so fun. I said to Leo, ‘If you’re right, I can legitimately say that about you. But if you said that the other way round, people would be horrified”’ Well, actually, I wouldn’t be so sure.

“Photographers catch you blinking and it makes you look drunk. Then the headline is ‘Drunk and tired’.”