When Carey Mulligan was preparing for her role in… meatShe had some reactions about the insults. The second season of the Netflix anthology series, which creator Lee Sung Jin describes as a sequel The sopranopart ingmar bergman, It trades in a deliciously dirty fight between Josh, Oscar Isaac’s country club manager, and his wife Lindsay, played by Mulligan. But Mulligan was concerned that some of the profanity sounded too American. “Sonny wrote [Lee] “A list of really awful British words – just all the dirty things we say to each other,” she says. “I was like, ‘I should definitely call someone a cunt.'”
the meat The gig came shortly after Mulligan finished promoting Bradley Cooper Maestroa black-and-white biopic of Leonard Bernstein that called for a nuanced performance and the painfully slow death of Mulligan’s character, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein. At that point, she had done almost everything a “serious actress” could do: British show business. Islands of the Folksy Coin Brothers. Important stories about the origins of the suffrage movement and the #MeToo movement. She received three Academy Award nominations. But she never did real comedy, and her work didn’t reflect her off-camera personality. Her friend and collaborator Emerald Fennell describes her as “naughty.” meat She was offered a chance to show this side to the world.
“I was thrilled that she punched someone in the face,” she says over breakfast at the Bel-Air Hotel, where she stays but doesn’t really sleep (she lives outside London, and jet lag has kept her up most of the night scrolling through photos of the three children she shares with musician Marcus Mumford). When Mulligan learned of the fifth episode that called for her character to kill a wolf in cold blood, she was completely hooked. “I called my agent immediately and said, ‘There’s something weird with a wolf, I’ve got to do it.'”
Fans of the first season of meat I will mention that The ever-escalating feud between Ali Wong and Steven Yeun’s characters begins with a bit of road rage. This time, it was a full-on brawl between Mulligan and Isaac, captured on video by Josh’s Gen Z staff (played by Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny). The recording gives them the power to blackmail a couple they believe has everything they want—mainly money, but also the happiness it’s supposed to buy—and Lindsay and Josh’s façade quickly fades.
For viewers who have been watching Mulligan play the serious actress for 20 years, meat You’ll also feel a little inspired. Despite being an A-list actress, she has escaped the tabloid machines and avoided the celebrity industrial complex. between Women’s right to vote, Promising young woman and She saidShe spent years being asked to speak about issues of feminism and sexual assault but was rarely asked to speak about her private life. in meather issues are more deeply rooted and personal: wanting children, wanting a divorce, wanting a face-lift. In fact, what unites almost all the characters in both seasons is the desperate belief that if only they could make it one Anything – a new job, a new face, a baby – everything will start to fall into place. It’s an easy excuse to ask Mulligan if she’s ever felt the same way.
Mulligan’s answer is, unfortunately, it doesn’t.
She grew up outside of London and describes her early life as very comfortable and beautiful but not of the same posh social strata in which she currently lives. Her mother, who is from Wales, was a university lecturer, and her father, originally from Liverpool, worked his way up from waiting tables in the hotel restaurant into running the business. They were not part of the entertainment industry, but art was not beyond their reach. Mulligan’s mother often took her to the theater, and the actor and writer Julian Fellowes, the creator of Mulligan’s play, was an actor Downton Abbeycame to give a lecture on acting at her high school which helped her decide to apply to drama school. She auditioned for the prestigious English conservatories RADA, Guildhall and LAMDA but was rejected by all three. “It actually didn’t feel like the end of the world because I saw how competitive it was,” she says. “I also used a clip of Sarah Kane about suicide in my monologue – not exactly a crowd pleaser.”
At her parents’ request, she accepted a place to study English at another university, then took a gap year pulling pints in a pub and trying to get auditions. “I thought, ‘Who’s the only actor I’ve ever met? It’s Julian, so I’ll email him.’ Fellowes’ wife, Emma, introduced Mulligan to a casting agent who was running an open casting call for the 2005 Keira Knightley-Matthew Macfadyen film starring Keira Knightley. pride and prejudiceThe invitation to play the role of Kitty Bennett came shortly before Mulligan was due to attend university. The role led to a play at London’s Royal Court Theatre, and then a six-month run on the Dickens adaptation Bleak House Then a loop of Doctor Who. “At that point, I realized: Oh, maybe this is my job.” “She never thought about being a celebrity. “My expectations were to continue doing supporting roles in television, plays if I could, and small roles in film.”
But then I got the main role in it education. What began as a niche British May-December romance on a shoestring budget — “The craft service was tea and a packet of biscuits,” she noted — gained major critical traction, earning Mulligan a surprise Best Actress nomination and newfound fame. The awards campaigns, along with A-list nominees like Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren and Sandra Bullock, have been confusing. She wasn’t comfortable in her body, and the red carpet and photo shoot process seemed kind of weird. (“My first child fixed that for me,” she says. “Standing up all of a sudden with your pants down isn’t such a terrible thing because you’ve done so much worse in front of the doctors and midwives.”) She says she basically broke up during her first Oscars party. When she returns in 2024 to MaestroYou couldn’t believe how small it was. She arrived late (traffic!) and ended up watching the monologue from the wings with the stage crew. “I had an audience perspective, and I was looking at all these amazing artists, and it was really just a group of people I’ve known for a long time.”
She met star Isaac in 2010, while filming a noir film Driving. Mulligan starred opposite Ryan Gosling; Isaac played her absent husband. I stayed in the guest room of director Nicolas Winding Refn’s house in the Hollywood Hills while they did night filming downtown. “The first time I met Carrie was in Nick’s living room before we started filming, and I remember it being exciting because we were young and on the cusp of something,” Isaac says. “This feeling lasted for about a week, and then we were exhausted. But it was great.”
When Mulligan was 25, she met her old friend Marcus Mumford — whose band Mumford & Sons was on the rise — at a concert in Nashville, and they began dating. A year later, they got married. “I was aware that people would look at marriage as a small thing, but I was like, ‘Well, we’ve known each other forever, so this doesn’t matter,'” she says. They’re a very public couple; they walk red carpets together, and Mulligan is often in the crowd at his concerts. “I went with him to perform SNL “Lately, it’s been nerve-wracking, but it’s also been fun, as my whole job that day is just to tell them they’re doing a great job,” she says.
But she’s also trying to understand For the privacy of the little one wherever possible. in meather character is having a secret text relationship with her ex-lover. “The backstory we created was that she went to university and met a member of the royal family, and they only dated for a month, but she ended up in the tabloids a lot, which gave her social exposure,” Mulligan says. During early edits of the season, Lee used Mumford’s headshot as an avatar whenever their WhatsApp messages appeared, and paparazzi shots of the real-life couple appeared on screen when the character Googled their fling. “We didn’t want to Photoshop anything, so it was easier for us to capture these real photos of Carrie at that age,” Lee says. “It got to the point where I needed to ask her permission to use Marcus’s photos in the final cut, and she was like, ‘Actually, I’d rather not.'” Instead, Mulligan introduced her best friend, director Writer Doyle (they met through mutual friend Zoe Kazan). The two were photographed constantly when Mulligan was in her early 20s and living in New York for a year Seagull. “The pictures are terrible, but there are so many of them,” she says.
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While Mulligan’s star power rose in the following years educationit was often difficult to find parts that were more than just WAGs, and she had to sift through a lot of text in search of something meatier. “You can spot it a mile away when there’s someone in the movie to serve that kind of purpose, so you can quickly say, ‘Oh, that’s just a girlfriend.'” Mulligan has been working with her UK agent, Victoria Belfrage, since she was 18, and that has helped protect her from falling into the “one for them, one for me” mentality that often pervades the industry. But it wasn’t guaranteed. She’s played numerous wives and girlfriends in films about men: in Inside Llewyn Davis, Driving, The Great Gatsby. “If there’s a great director or a great writer, and there seems to be an opportunity to do something more interesting, then I’ll step in,” she says.
Fennell approached in 2018. She was looking for a lead actress in her first film, Promising young womana rape-revenge thriller, needed someone with emotional appeal to help anchor the film’s escalating world. “I met Carrie once at a friend’s house, and like all the people I love, she’s cool and charming,” Fennell says. “I don’t mean alternately—I mean it’s at once a burst of sunshine and icy stillness.” Mulligan knew it would be a big swing, but she found she trusted Fennell’s decision-making enough to do it. The ending is provocative. The script called for her character to be strangled by her late friend’s rapist, and Fennell planned to film for the length of time it would realistically take to die. “We never see the real bleakness of something like this,” Fennell says. According to her father-in-law, a former policeman, she needed two and a half minutes.
Mulligan insisted on doing it herself, without using a body double. Although there were safety protocols in place, it was risky. “The problem is that if you’re holding a pillow over someone’s face and they’re pretending to suffocate for several minutes, your margin for error is very small,” Fennell says. There was an exaggerated shot, and even though their hand signal warning system was working, it took an effort for Mulligan to understand what was happening to her and give the signal. Mulligan went outside and cried quickly, then came back for another take. (The shock of that scene didn’t last long. Mulligan decided to act as her body double in the next shot, when Max Greenfield and Chris Lowell were consoling each other while her body sagged. Next to them. “I was there with a pillow sitting on my head while they were excavating, and it was immediately funny, so that cleansed the whole thing,” she says.)
Her instincts stem not just from a good situation, but from a desire to avoid her pet peeve: actors who can’t “keep it up.” She hates it when people are late, don’t know their lines, or aren’t considerate of the crew. She tried to make her behavior No. 1 on the call-out list after the women she worked with early on: she was shocked to see that Judi Dench knew the name of every person on the set. pride and prejudiceAnd there was a day when… education I ran over for 45 minutes and Emma Thompson bought everyone pizza and beer to make up for it.
timing Promising young womanwhich premiered at Sundance in 2020 and then went through pandemic disinfectant before eventually being dumped on VOD, was a disappointment. When awards season came that year, everyone involved was so nervous about the whole process that Mumford offered a bet: If Mulligan was denied an Oscar nomination, she would have to get a small tattoo; If you register, it will be signed. (He now has three Oscars for each of her nominations.) After that, Mulligan never felt the need to keep her string of leadership roles intact. “I love being called up from the bench for a two-week shift for something really cool,” she says.
That’s how she ended up on her next vinyl project, Saltburn; She read the script as a friend and then immediately asked to play the (small) part of Poor Dear Pamela. I read Wuthering Heights Also early, but he declined to ask to join. “I was like, [Emerald and I] He’ll be cooking something else, and it’s good to leave some space so people don’t think, “Oh, again.” ”
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On the first day of filming meatMulligan felt unsure about his tone. “I kept saying, ‘Are we supposed to be funny?’ “There were phrases that destroyed me, like when we were fighting, and Oscar said to me: ‘You wear wonderful dresses, you drive a beautiful car, and we had dinner with Bono,'” she says. “Every time he did that, I just broke.”
“The amazing thing about Carrie is that her bullshit-detecting radar is the most accurate I’ve ever seen,” Lee says. He refers to a scene early in the season, when she is arguing with the tennis coach at the country club, and her askew handkerchief, blown up by the breeze, hits her in the face. “I didn’t have to say to her, ‘Hey, let’s focus on the comedy,’ because she plays everything so inherently that of course she’ll play it like nothing happened,” he says. “The steadier it is, the merrier.” Throughout the post, he noticed how much she was doing with her eyes alone — she could achieve new levels of vengeance with a single look. “I sent her a lot of text messages saying, ‘How are you doing this?’ I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, laughing.
The two actors spent months preparing for the show. They completed an intensive workshop in which they worked out the details of their fairytale marriage, coming up with little details like the couple’s matching tattoos commemorating their first trip to Coachella. (Mulligan admits that she and Mumford have their own collection, which she lovingly describes as “awkward.” It’s a bit of a habit: She’s also gotten a tattoo to commemorate women’s right to vote, The historical drama she created with Helena Bonham Carter and Anne-Marie Duff – adaptation of the film, Love that conquers. “I asked the other actresses to come with me after the party, and they all refused.”)
Mulligan and Isaac also rehearsed the big, physical fight scene ad nauseam. “My coping style is if I’m with the person I’m angry with, I stay silent,” Mulligan says. “But if that person isn’t there, I’ll scream and scream to everyone who will listen. To the point where my husband has to say, ‘Okay, we’ve got that covered.’”
That day, Mulligan found she couldn’t quite get there. The script called for her character to throw a wine glass at Isaac’s head, escalating things into a struggle with a golf club. “I was supposed to say something about how I was going to sleep with everyone at the club, but I didn’t feel angry enough,” she says. “But then Sonny came and said, ‘I don’t think you want to say that. “I think you want to tell him that you wasted my whole life.” And I said, “Yes, that’s what she’s angry about.”
After promotion meatMulligan will return home to Devon to decompress before Mumford embarks on his next tour (she’ll join him and the kids for shows that coincide with school breaks). The town and their home, located on a working farm, are a far cry from the star-studded surroundings of the Bel-Air. She is the only popular person in her group of friends, and she offers what she describes as an antidote to the self-obsession that one can develop as an actor. “I was going to a friend’s Battle after battleSaying it’s the greatest thing I’ve seen in the last 10 years, and she was like, “Who’s in it?” “I was like, ‘Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn,'” she says with a laugh. She said: Which one is this? Is it from Shaun of the Dead“And I was like, ‘I can’t believe you don’t know who Sean Penn is, but also, oh my God, this is great.’ Here I’m worrying about what people will think of my show or how they’ll compare to other things, and my best friend says, ‘Who’s Sean Penn?'”
But Mulligan makes no claims to normalcy. Before we said goodbye, she showed me photos on her phone from a recent ceremony at Windsor Castle to commemorate her new title of CBE, Most Distinguished Commander of the Order of the British Empire (a selfie in which she wears the medal as a brooch). “I was head over heels for Oscar in all the joint interviews we did,” she says. And given her favorite line from the show, I couldn’t resist asking: Have you ever had dinner with Bono? “Oh, well, yeah,” she says with a smile.
