Carey Mulligan takes the lead role in “Far From the Madding Crowd.”
By Ruthe Stein
From the offers coming her way, Carey Mulligan is convinced that Hollywood no longer thinks of her just as the naive gamine she played in her breakthrough movie, “An Education,” for which she won comparisons to Audrey Hepburn and a best actress Oscar nomination.
In the forthcoming “Far From the Madding Crowd” and “Suffragette,” she plays the antithesis of an adorable innocent: a strong woman persevering in a man’s world. If Mulligan hadn’t turned down a proposal to play Hillary Rodham Clinton in a biopic to be called “Rodham,” it would have been three movies in which her characters forcefully assert themselves.
“The part wasn’t the right fit for me,” she says of her decision. “In general, I don’t like playing real people who are still alive — or even people no longer alive. There is a great responsibility.” (“Rodham” is listed as still in development.)
Instead, Mulligan returned to the stage to appear opposite Bill Nighy in a well-received production of David Hare’s “Skylight.” They play former lovers whose romance is rekindled when he unexpectedly appears at her doorstep. Mulligan’s culinary skills, as well as her acting skills, are on view. She is called upon to cook a spaghetti dinner onstage nearly every night.
“The theater is what I grew up wanting to do,” says Mulligan, 29. “I never thought about making movies. I love the immediacy of the stage. I kind of enjoy that I can’t see the audience. On a really good night when things are going really well, it feels as if it is just Bill and me. I guess it is like a delusional thing I fall into.”
Home to London
Her “Skylight” contract specified a week off to allow her to promote “Far From the Madding Crowd.” She took advantage of the time to return home to London and her husband of three years, Marcus Mumford, lead singer of Mumford & Sons. (They were pen pals as kids and later became reacquainted.)
Because of the time difference between London and the United States, Mulligan has been working far into the night answering questions about her new movies. If it is wearing her down, it is not apparent in her energetic answers.
After Mulligan was cast as Bathsheba, the heroine of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel, she read the book for the first time and found it “incredibly forward-thinking about women. Bathsheba could almost be a modern woman with her determination to make the farm she inherits a success.” Mulligan isn’t familiar with the 1967 film adaptation of the book and has no immediate plans to remedy that.
“I am really curious to watch it, but not while I was making our film,” she says. “I was sure I would subconsciously have copied some behavioral thing. Nobody needs to see my bad impersonation of Julie Christie.”
Christie, who lives on a sheep farm, not unlike Bathsheba, and has been spotted riding London buses with her pensioner bus pass, is realistic about actresses stepping into her famous roles. (A PBS version of “Madding Crowd” ran in 1998.)
“Life is about youth. It’s all about the energy and surge of the young,” Christie recently told the London Express. “That is how it has always been.”
The novel tells the story of three men with a passionate interest in Bathsheba and how she decides which one to pick — sort of a “Dating Game” among Victorians.
Worst possible choices
Without revealing particulars, let’s simply say that Bathsheba makes the worst possible choice. Mulligan has thought at length about why such an intelligent, forceful woman would err so badly and concludes that it comes down to one thing: sex.
“He says things to her that men in that time shouldn’t have said to women,” Mulligan says. “She has this kind of sexual awakening through him. It is the first time she has had these sensations. It is so strong that she falls into temporary madness. She is besotted with him, and by the time she snaps back to reality, she is married and, of course, divorce would have been out of the question in those times.”
Alan Bates, who played one of Bathsheba’s suitors in the early version, said in a 1967 interview that the story seemed to him to be about “the very deep-seated passions between these four people.”
Debonair soldier
He wasn’t happy cast as a rough-hewn sheep farmer, “simply because I felt it would come as no surprise to anybody that I could do it, you know. It called on certain qualities I’d used before,” Bates said. Instead he longed to be seen as the debonair soldier, a part first played by Terence Stamp, and played by Tom Sturridge in the new version.
Mulligan appears to be born to play Bathsheba. They share a skin condition that causes them to go bright red at the mildest embarrassment. “I think it has to do with her openness and being vulnerable in a good way,” says Mulligan, who might be talking about herself.
An awkward moment for her occurred when she was called upon to sing. It brought back the vulnerability she felt singing “New York, New York” to a nightclub audience in the movie “Shame.”
“I take comfort every time I have to sing when the director tells me I don’t have to be good at singing, that the character isn’t good at it,” she says. In “Madding Crowd,” it felt comfortable because “that was really the way people entertained each other. There wasn’t anything else.”
Wardrobe was another concern. The style in the 19th century was to accentuate a woman’s waist, and Mulligan found herself squeezed into very tiny outfits with elaborate
corsets.
“They had to cut me out of a dress that was slightly too small,” she says. “I got two minutes into the scene and I couldn’t breathe at all.”
She happily changed costumes for “Suffragette,” in which she appears with Meryl Streep and Helena Bonham Carter, all playing early feminists.
“They are based on an actual group of women, who formed a militant cell and fought for women’s rights,” Mulligan says, adding that she had never before been on a set before where the director, writer, producer and most of the cast were female.
Equal rights moment
“We’re telling a story of one of the biggest moments in equal rights — a story never really told before,” she says. Working with Streep was “pretty much a dream come true. I had to keep pinching myself when I was acting in a scene with her.”
In late June, when “Skylight” closes, Mulligan and her husband plan to go on belated holiday to celebrate her birthday — she turns 30 in May.
“We’re thinking of Italy. But, anyway, somewhere hot,” she says. “I used to really not like beach holidays. I thought I should be doing something. But now just lying still for a week and drinking wine and eating tapas sounds great.”