Upping her game
Why Carey Mulligan’s role in Wildlife could be her careerdefining performance
There’s no secret to coaxing an outstanding performance out of an actor — that’s according to first-time director Paul Dano, at least. not when you’re working with carey Mulligan. “When you’ve got an actor that good,” he says, “my job is just to create an environment for them to do their best work.”
Based on a 2006 novel by richard Ford, Wildlife sees Mulligan play Jeanette, a 1960s housewife and mother in a boring Montana town. her husband, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), a man mad at the world for his own shortcomings, leaves his family indefinitely to work as a firefighter while her teenage son, Joe (ed oxenbould), watches with horror as his parents’ marriage splinters. It’s a remarkably assured debut from Dano, who has had about as good a film school as anyone could hope for working under the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson, Denis Villeneuve and steve Mcqueen.
“I’d been thinking about directing since I was 19 or 20,” says Dano. “I wanted to make a film for years, I just didn’t have a film to make. When I read this book I knew it was it. It had the appearance of simplicity, but there’s great strength and complexity and poetry in it.” After securing the rights, Dano excitedly wrote a script, his first, and proudly showed his work to his partner, Zoe Kazan. “she tore it apart,” Dano laughs. “It was pretty devastating. red pen on every single page.” Wounds licked, Dano collaborated with Kazan to rework the script together. “she knew what I was trying to get at.”
securing such a prestigious pair of leads was not as hard as you might think. “Zoe and carey did a play years ago, so I’ve known her for a decade,” says Dano. “I actually met Jake at her wedding.” of course, it was a lot more than just familiarity that got them on board. The Wildlife script gives Mulligan a rich, nuanced character to dig into, and leads to easily her finest performance since An Education, as Jeanette turns from picture-perfect mother to a struggling, flawed woman left to fend for herself in a life she didn’t choose. “I wondered if it could be fun for her to play someone a bit messy,” says Dano. And what mess: the smart money says that next year’s Best Actress oscar is Mulligan’s to lose. Wildlife is in cinemas from 9 november