CANDY CRUSH
‘When the script came to my agent,’ says Mulligan, ‘I just didn’t know what to do with it. I thought, “Why would Emerald ask me to do this?”’ The part, and the movie, were outside Mulligan’s usual territory and the challenge to do something different was irresistible. Mulligan is more often found in period pieces – The Great Gatsby, Suffragette, Far from the Madding Crowd. She tends to play characters more obviously sympathetic, such as the grieving widow, Edith Pretty, in her other new project, a Netflix film called The Dig, which takes place on the eve of World War II and tells the story of the discovery of a haul of Anglo-Saxon artefacts beneath Edith’s land. Edith is the quintessential Mulligan role – slightly pained, wry, and often giving the impression of a buried emotional life communicated through a tiny half-smile, or a flicker of an eyebrow.
Cassie, by contrast, is flamboyant and fierce. Mulligan delighted at the thought of playing someone who wasn’t meant to be ‘nice’, whose actions might make viewers feel uncomfortable. She did precisely the thing she’d promised her agent she would stop doing (‘I’ve got in trouble in the past for committing to things out of enthusiasm’) and arranged a coffee with Fennell. They’d met, previously, at a friend’s house, when Mulligan had been struck by Fennell’s wit, and her excellent trousers. This time, though, it was straight to business. ‘I said, Em, I just have to tell you, I love it so much, please let’s do this,’ she recalls. ‘And from then on, it was just super fun.’
Back in her former life, pre-children, Mulligan used to spend months preparing for a role. Before she played Daisy in The Great Gatsby, she went to Princeton and studied the letters between F Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King, the author’s inspiration for Daisy. The academic approach, she says now, was ‘all qualification: – I didn’t go to drama school, I kind of felt like a chancer, so I figured that I had to do loads of homework so that I was allowed to be here.’ Currently, things are a little different, she says, laughing. ‘The reality of my life now is that I have two kids under the age of five, and I’m lucky if I can learn my lines and show up.’
Researching Cassie mostly took the form of conversations with Fennell. Together, they constructed her backstory and were inspired by work the director had done on the film’s look and feel. The finished product is a carnival of pastels and neons, Mulligan sporting big, blonde hair and giving off a dark, furious energy. Fennell had also made a Spotify playlist to guide the tone, including songs by Charlie XCX, Paris Hilton and two different versions of Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’. Cassie’s wardrobe alone took some getting used to. Remembering one forbiddingly tiny outfit, Mulligan says: ‘I haven’t worn a dress like that in my personal life, probably ever.’
On the contrary: for years, Mulligan says, she would end up in tears on photo-shoots or after red carpets, finding the public performance of herself in clothes she’d never usually choose to be agonising. Now, she simply has a note that goes in advance to the stylist – no jeans, and nothing above the knee. ‘It’s so much easier,’ she says. Having the confidence to make such a demand took a while to build – and speaks to a wider shift in her acting, too. No other actor I can think of has been so critical of their past performances as Mulligan. Often, in interviews, she would talk about what she’d got wrong. It has taken a while to channel that selfdoubt into something more productive, a change she credits to Paul Dano, the American actor and director of Wildlife. During the filming of a scene when Mulligan’s character, Jeanette, is falling apart, she felt she repeatedly made mistakes. ‘I kept going, “Cut! Fuck! Sorry! Paul! Sorry!” And he was like, “Stop cutting yourself! Stop trying to do it perfectly… just let her feel this stuff.”’
Dano’s intervention was, for her, radical. It meant that when it came to wearing that tiny dress in Promising Young Woman, a costume that would usually have induced paroxysms of anxiety, she could take all that unease and give it to her character. Insecurity was no longer undercutting her performance but being repurposed to fuel it.
There’s a kinship between Promising Young Woman and two defining series written and made by women recently – Fleabag by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and I May Destroy You by Michaela Coel; not just in the subject matter – whether the richness of female friendship or the aftermath of sexual assault – but also the creation of indelible heroines who are not, and are not trying to be, entirely likeable. ‘We are finally understanding that audiences want to see stories about women who aren’t necessarily always nice,’ says Mulligan. ‘You still root for them, you still care about them – it’s brilliantly done in Fleabag, and brilliantly done in I May Destroy You.
Some of the stuff that both of those characters do is totally morally questionable and unpleasant, but you’re 100 per cent behind them, the whole way through.’
Aside from the kind of compellingly ambiguous characters they showcase, there is also the fact that these stories can now actually get made. Reflecting on her career, Mulligan says there simply wasn’t the opportunity for women film-makers and writers to make such movies when she started. ‘I certainly didn’t feel any of this kind of activity for the first decade I was working.’ In her view, a gamechanging moment was Blue Jasmine, the 2013 Woody Allen film in which Cate Blanchett played the title role, winning an Oscar for her performance. ‘I remember thinking, “Oh, there’s loads of brilliant, complex parts being written for women,”’ says Mulligan. But after that, things seemed to regress again: ‘It was like one step forwards, two steps back.’ (Also, it was still a film written by a man, one mired in controversy, who has had to publicly deny sexual abuse.) Only in the past couple of years has she felt that the landscape has truly changed, with women writers and directors getting the kind of backing they’ve long deserved and, as a result, creating parts like Cassie. Mulligan smiles at the thought not just of Cassie, but the antics all of these unforgettable characters: ‘It’s really fun to see people behaving badly.’
So, has the process of working with Fennell given her an appetite to do the same – to make a story of her own? ‘Not right now,’ says Mulligan, frankly. ‘I don’t know, it’s funny. If I spend too long on something, or if I see too much behind the curtain, I don’t really want to participate.’ Partly it’s the reality of life with small children, and the consequential lack of time. But also, she quite likes just being, as she puts it, ‘an actor for hire’ – turning up, doing her job, leaving. When filming The Dig, she rented a house as close to set as she could and made it home for bath-time most days. But her attitude reveals a little more than just the logistics of juggling family and work; it’s also part of who Mulligan is, and the way she chooses to be. She talks about enjoying the mystery of jobs: her dream is to be sent a wonderful script, to unwrap it like a present, make the movie and then disappear. She doesn’t want to analyse shots or watch the rushes, has no inclination to be involved in the filmmaking beyond playing her part. ‘It makes me feel very self-aware.’ she says. ‘I like being just an actor. I like just showing up and doing my thing and then leaving them to it.’
‘Promising Young Woman’ is coming soon to cinemas. ‘The Dig’ is available on Netflix now.