Carey Mulligan on her ‘women’s liberation trilogy’
As a young woman with acting aspirations, she wrote to Kenneth Branagh asking for advice after seeing him in “Henry V.” At 16, she wrote to “Mr. Eminem” to tell the rapper what a fan she was of “8 Mile.” After Julian Fellowes visited her school, she wrote to the screenwriter, too, forging a connection that led to meeting casting directors and ultimately landing a part in the 2005 film “Pride & Prejudice.”
“I didn’t have any way into the industry. I didn’t know what my route in was,” says Mulligan. “Sometimes, I feel compelled to write to someone to tell them how brilliant they are. I wrote to Amy Adams after ‘Arrival’ and I was like: ‘You are the best actress on the planet.’”
That Mulligan found her way by seizing it with something as old-fashioned as pen and paper is appropriate. Since her debut in “Pride & Prejudice,” her career has frequently been one of time travel. In a long string of period films, from her breakthrough in the 1961 London-set “An Education” to her latest, “Wildlife,” set in 1960s Montana, she has vividly brought to life portraits of women through history, women whose own paths were too constrained to be freed by sheer force of will and a stamp.
Since 2015’s “Suffragette” — a movie she says reinvigorated her feelings about women’s rights today — Mulligan has played a kind of modern woman sought for marriage by a battery of suitors in 1874 England (“Far From the Madding Crowd”), a cultivated woman dragged to postWWII Mississippi by her husband (“Mudbound”), and, in Paul Dano’s Richard Ford adaptation “Wildlife,” a trapped, aimless woman whose husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) leaves her and their 14-year-old boy (Ed Oxenbould) in a remote Montana town while he goes off to fight forest fires.
“They’re all kind of weirdly linked and not by any design,” Mulligan said in an interview last month over tea on a rainy morning. “But there is a kind of through-line. It’s like a women’s liberation trilogy.”
The roles have collectively been an education for Mulligan, each with plenty of relevance to today’s battles for gender equality, within and without the movie industry. But Mulligan is also — and she stresses this — ready for something more modern day.
“I’m absolutely dying to do a contemporary film. I can’t even begin to tell you how much. Every time I get a great script, it just happens to be a period film. There is something wonderful about getting to visit different eras. But I’d also completely love to do something contemporary. But it just doesn’t happen,” says Mulligan.
The appeal, though, of “Wildlife” was two-fold. It was a chance to work with longtime friends. Mulligan has for years known Dano, Gyllenhaal and Zoe Kazan, who wrote the script with Dano, her partner. (Kazan and Mulligan co-starred in the 2008 Broadway staging of “The Seagull.”) And it was also a kind of part that Mulligan has seldom had the opportunity to play. When her husband strands them, confusion and regret consumes Jeanette Brinson, and she lurches desperately in search of stability — all while her son anxiously watches.