Carey mulligan
English Rose gets tough in new drama Suffragette.
When Total Film walks into a suite in London’s swishy Soho Hotel to meet Carey Mulligan, the actress appears to be blending in beautifully with her surroundings. Sitting on a chair upholstered in green foliage material, Mulligan’s elegant cream and green dress is similarly patterned. We joke that she is camouflaged, like one of those creatures that can adapt and perfectly reflect a new environment. TF momentarily struggles to recall the name. “A chameleon,” says Mulligan, holding out her hand in welcome. Quite so.
It’s apt that the versatile Mulligan, 30, should so decisively remember the word. It’s one that has often been used to describe her protean career. Doctor Who’s Sally Sparrow, wide-eyed Jenny from An Education, Never Let Me Go’s Kathy, Mia Farrow-like in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, naked (figuratively and literally) in Shame, the enigmatic Daisy Buchanan in Baz Lurhmann’s The Great Gatsby and most recently, feisty Bathsheba in Far From The Madding Crowd. Blonde, brunette, English-accented, American-twanged, corseted or modern, Oscar and BAFTA-nominated, Mulligan seems to have covered all bases. But the unifying element of them all has been the strength in her characters and her own conviction that the female role doesn’t need to be clichéd, weak or token.
Take her attitude to working with director Oliver Stone (not known for his affinity with actresses) on Wall Street, where she insisted her character was beefed up; she “went in trying to be like a boy – and he treated me like one of the boys”. Or when she talked Nicholas Winding Refn into casting her as a single mother in Drive in a role conceived for an older Latino woman. Or even her fierce determination to be an actress despite three drama school rejections – she simply wrote to Kenneth Branagh asking him to be her mentor and also drilled Julian Fellowes for advice when he came to speak at her school (she made such an impression that he was instrumental in her being cast in her first film role on Pride & Prejudice).
No surprise then that a strong woman who often plays strong women should be drawn to her latest project, Suffragette, in which she plays Maud, a beleaguered East End laundry girl who finds strength and sisterhood in the burgeoning woman’s liberation movement. Well, not exactly. “I remember my agent called me and said that there’s a film about suffragettes. I had the image from Mary Poppins [ of twittering upper class suffragette Mrs Banks] and I was like, ‘That sounds... boring,’” Mulligan admits with a laugh. “I’ve been quite intentional about trying to avoid British period dramas, because I did a lot of that stuff when I was younger, and I think it’s quite an easy pigeonhole for British actresses.
So I was like, ‘Nah, not really interested in putting on a corset.’”
But then Mulligan discovered the screenplay was written by Shame and Iron
Lady scribe Abi Morgan, and on reading it found herself shocked to realise how little she actually knew about this part of British history. “I don’t remember doing anything [ at school]. I think there was like a page in our textbooks about social movements in Victorian Britain, and it was like, Suffragettes...” she motions a tiny amount between thumb and forefinger. “But all of the hunger striking and forced feeding, the police brutality, the protests, blowing up churches... all of this stuff was crazy to me.”
Signing up to the project, Mulligan found herself (unusually) on a film with a female director, screenwriter, producers (Alison Owen and Faye Ward) and largely female cast. “It was definitely a different atmosphere,” she says. “You don’t want to assign it to being a gender thing – ‘oh, if it was men, it would have been a nightmare’ – but I’ll be so bold to say that there was no hierarchy, and there were no egos. You can probably attribute that to being that there were more women in the room than men!”
Though Maud is a dramatic creation, women’s lack of rights in the early 20th century (both domestically and in the workplace) and the lengths suffragettes went to in order to shine a light on their cause (bombings, prison, marches, loss of family, income and reputation) was based on real events. Mulligan, a self-confessed research fiend (“I practically did a PhD in Fitzgerald before The Great Gatsby”) soaked up everything she could find in the eight months before filming began. And she suggested to her directer, Sarah Gavron, that they might ask Meryl Streep to play the small but key role of suffragette figurehead, Emmeline Pankhurst. “My mum and I were talking about who would be ‘The Dream’ [ to cast as Emmeline]. The dream would be Meryl Streep because she’s the most iconic actress of any generation, she’s the best actress, she’s got this authority and women like her, blah blah blah. I said it to Sarah and then they offered it to her, and she said yes. We were all like, ‘What the… FUCK?! What has happened to our film?!’”
The addition of Streep to a film also starring Helena Bonham Carter, Romela Garai, Anne-Marie Duff, Brendan Gleeson and Ben Whishaw means that Suffragette is getting awards buzz and is opening this year’s London Film Festival. Mulligan’s heartfelt turn, in particular, is being talked of in gong terms. (Mulligan’s on-screen husband, Whishaw certainly thinks so: “I would hope [ she’s nominated] – it’s such a beautiful performance.”) It’s a route Mulligan has been down before having done the award circuit for An Education in 2010.
“I was completely bewildered by the whole thing, aalnd terrified, and hated it, and was miserable!” Mulligan laughs at the memory. “If we do end up doing that with Suffragette, I think we’ll have a lovely time. I won’t be 24 and I won’t be crying on red carpets! I think I took the whole thing so seriously and I was so freaked out. But once you’ve done it, you realise it’s a campaign – it’s about holding babies and shaking hands. If you’re willing to do that and there’s money behind your campaign, then you’ll do well. But you can’t take it seriously. You look at the most incredible performances every year that are completely unrecognised. The only reason is because they didn’t show up to the right parties and stand on the right red carpets and wear the right dress.”
That sense of dismissal is something that Mulligan also admits to feeling as a woman in the film industry, and something she feels that makes the suffragette story still relevant. Female stars are still paid less than men in Hollywood. “I’ve definitely been paid less than my male counterparts,” she says, a frown creeping across her face. “And I don’t mean co-stars, because I do think that I should never get paid as much as Leonardo DiCaprio because he’s an enormous movie star who’s been acting for 30 years. But when I’ve been at pretty much the same career level as someone who’s been acting the same time as me and they’ve got
“I’ve been trying to avoid British period dramas; it’s an easy pigeonhole for British actresses”
paid more, that’s obviously been unfair. That’s happened a couple times.” She smiles. “But then I always feel like I’ve been paid very well to do a job that I love, and I feel embarrassed to whinge about money because I get paid more than most people. But it’s important within whatever industry you’re in to stand up and say, ‘Actually, this isn’t alright for me to be getting paid less just because of my sex.’”
After finishing on Suffragette, Mulligan hungered for some theatre (“When I’m doing a play, I always think, ‘God, I can’t wait to do a film.’ When I’m doing a film, I think, ‘Ugh, I want to do a play and not have to cut every two minutes, and not have to have my hair played with!’”). So she went off to Broadway to reprise her critically acclaimed West End performance opposite Bill Nighy in David Hare’s Skylight. “If you find a good play and a good cast and a good director, then there’s nothing better – it’s amazing. But if you’re in a bad play, it’s a nightmare. If it’s not working, it goes on forever, and it feels so painful. Whereas if a film’s not great you kind of run along. You’re not really that aware of it until afterwards!”
For the duration of the run Mulligan and her husband of three years, Marcus Mumford, moved to New York and tooled around the city, though she admits doing eight shows a week didn’t leave much time for a social life. “You walk past restaurants of people at 5 o’clock having a glass of wine, and you’re like, ‘That looks so nice,’” she confesses. “You’re like, ‘What am I doing? I’m just going to sit in the dark and cry for two hours in front of strangers.’” During that time Mulligan was papped cycling round Manhattan in baggy clothes, prompting speculation she was pregnant. She is – and absentmindedly strokes her stomach as we chat. But Mulligan has always been one to keep her private life just that. She generally, she feels, flies under the radar. And purposefully so.
“You choose the way you go out, the way you have dinners,” she says, twisting her hair round her fingers. “I think I’ve only been photographed in London once or twice – and once was coming out of the Groucho Club after LFF for Never Let
Me Go. Obviously, that’s going to happen. But I feel London’s not a problem for me. New York and LA are different. There are whole parts of New York that I don’t go to because the risk of being there – you’re just going to get followed [ by paparazzi]. And then LA is just a madhouse. It’s nice to go there as little as possible.”
Born and raised in London to a Liverpudlian dad and Welsh mum, Mulligan still considers the capital her home, but can be enticed to LA for projects she feels strongly about. One of those has long been rumoured to be a re-team with Nicolas Winding Refn on I Walk With The
Dead. Mulligan shakes her head and laughs. “Years ago when we were in Comic-Con someone interviewed him and said, ‘What are you going to do?’ And he said, ‘It’s called I Walk With The
Dead. And it’s a sexual thriller.’ And I was like, ‘Holy shit! What are we doing?’ I would definitely work with him again but that’s not something that’s sitting in my inbox right now.”
Her next project is “getting this done” she says pointing at her bump with a grin, and she plans to take a well-earned break and “just hang out for a bit”. Well, until another interesting, multifaceted role tickles her fancy, anyway. “It’s not that I definitely won’t work this year,” she smiles, “I just haven’t found anything yet...”
Suffragette opens on 12 October.