Carey goes carefree
With a blinding lead role in Promising Young Woman, Carey Mulligan is learning to throw the shackles off
THE LAST TIME Empire interviewed Carey Mulligan, in 2018, she hinted at a new phase in her career, wanting to shake things up. Come through, then, Emerald Fennell, writer and director of Promising Young Woman. “The mission,” says Mulligan now, thinking back to 2018, “was to do things that I hadn’t seen before, or that looked at things in a different way, and Promising Young Woman definitely did that. I read it and thought, ‘What the actual fuck? How do you pull this off?’”
The film is indeed a tonal rollercoaster — as Mulligan says, “dark, dark comedy and tragedy and trauma and darkness and horror that’s also a love story… and a thriller” — but incredibly, it works. The same applies to Mulligan’s character Cassie, a young woman who pretends to be absolutely slaughtered at nightclubs, only to turn the tables on the men who attempt to take advantage of her. There is trauma — and revenge — behind it all, and you root for her, even though she can be awful herself, spitting in a suitor’s coffee because, well, why not.
All of this excited Mulligan. “I just think we don’t need to like everything that someone does to love them,” she says. “We all love people who behave in ways that we don’t like all the time. “I hope that you want the best for her because she’s essentially a good person, and she’s doing something that she believes in.” The film takes predatory men to task, and little research was needed there. “The sad reality about this stuff is that pretty much every woman I know has experienced this kind of behaviour to varying degrees,” says Mulligan. “As a teenager and young woman, you just grow up with it.”
Above and beyond what the film is exploring, though, she relished the opportunities to let loose — and there were many of them. “It’s really fun to smash up a car. That’s just a fun day at work,” she says. And then there’s the sequence in which she and Bo Burnham sing along to Paris Hilton’s Stars Are Blind in a pharmacy. She was inhibited for a bit. “For the first five takes I barely did anything. And Emerald was like, ‘Carey, you have to do something. You’ve got to get into it.’ I was like, ‘I just don’t think Cassie would.’ She said, ‘No, shut up.’ So finally I thought, ‘Oh fuck it, let’s do it.’” The result is absurd, and glorious. Mulligan can consider her career well and truly shaken up.
PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN IS IN CINEMAS FROM 12 FEBRUARY