{"id":185872,"date":"2018-10-17T03:08:28","date_gmt":"2018-10-17T07:08:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=185872"},"modified":"2018-10-17T03:15:21","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T07:15:21","slug":"carey-mulligan-womens-liberation-trilogy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/10\/17\/carey-mulligan-womens-liberation-trilogy\/","title":{"rendered":"Carey Mulligan on her ‘women’s liberation trilogy’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cI didn’t have any way into the industry. I didn’t know what my route in was,\u201d says Mulligan. (File Photo<\/a>: Eva Rinaldi\/Flickr<\/a>, CC BY-SA 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

TORONTO \u2013 Carey Mulligan is a letter writer.<\/p>\n

As a young woman with acting aspirations, she wrote to Kenneth Branagh asking for advice after seeing him in \u201cHenry V.\u201d At 16, she wrote to \u201cMr. Eminem\u201d to tell the rapper what a fan she was of \u201c8 Mile.\u201d After Julian Fellowes visited her school, she wrote to the screenwriter, too, forging a connection that led to meeting casting directors and ultimately landing a part in the 2005 film \u201cPride & Prejudice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn’t have any way into the industry. I didn’t know what my route in was,\u201d says Mulligan. \u201cSometimes, I feel compelled to write to someone to tell them how brilliant they are. I wrote to Amy Adams after ‘Arrival’ and I was like: ‘You are the best actress on the planet.\u201d’<\/p>\n

That Mulligan found her way by seizing it with something as old-fashioned as pen and paper is appropriate. Since her debut in \u201cPride & Prejudice,\u201d her career has frequently been one of time travel. In a long string of period\u00a0films, from her breakthrough in the 1961 London-set \u201cAn Education\u201d to her latest, \u201cWildlife,\u201d set in 1960s Montana, she has vividly brought to life portraits of women through history, women whose own paths were too constrained to be freed by sheer force of will and a stamp.<\/p>\n

Since 2015’s \u201cSuffragette\u201d \u2013 a movie she says reinvigorated her feelings about women’s rights today \u2013 Mulligan has played a kind of modern woman sought for marriage by a battery of suitors in 1874 England (\u201cFar From the Madding Crowd\u201d), a cultivated woman dragged to post-WWII Mississippi by her husband (\u201cMudbound\u201d), and, in Paul Dano’s Richard Ford adaptation \u201cWildlife,\u201d a trapped, aimless woman whose husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) leaves her and their 14-year-old boy (Ed Oxenbould) in a remote Montana town while he goes off to fight forest fires.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey’re all kind of weirdly linked and not by any design,\u201d Mulligan said in an interview last month over tea on a rainy morning. \u201cBut there is a kind of through-line. It’s like a women’s liberation trilogy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The roles have collectively been an education for Mulligan, each with plenty of relevance to today’s battles for gender equality, within and without the movie industry. But Mulligan is also \u2013 and she stresses this \u2013 ready for something more modern day.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m absolutely dying to do a contemporary film. I can’t even begin to tell you how much. Every time I get a great script, it just happens to be a period film. There is something wonderful about getting to visit different eras. But I’d also completely love to do something contemporary. But it just doesn’t happen,\u201d says Mulligan.<\/p>\n

The appeal, though, of \u201cWildlife\u201d was two-fold. It was a chance to work with longtime friends. Mulligan has for years known Dano, Gyllenhaal and Zoe Kazan, who wrote the script with Dano, her partner. (Kazan and Mulligan co-starred in the 2008 Broadway staging of \u201cThe Seagull.\u201d) And it was also a kind of part that Mulligan has seldom had the opportunity to play. When her husband strands them, confusion and regret consumes Jeanette Brinson, and she lurches desperately in search of stability \u2013 all while her son anxiously watches.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thing that really scared me about it was the idea of failing your children,\u201d says Mulligan, who has two children with singer-songwriter Marcus Mumford. \u201cTo think about the notion of at one point letting them down in the future in some profound way, it’s just so frightening.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the festival circuit, both in Cannes and at the recent New York Film Festival, Mulligan has found herself defending Jeanette, whose wheels may be coming off, but she’s doing her best in constricted circumstances. \u201cSomeone in Cannes was like, ‘Gosh, she’s such a terrible mother.’ I was like, ‘Hang on a minute,\u201d’ Mulligan says.<\/p>\n

Early on, Kazan \u2013 who for years exchanged drafts with Dano \u2013 realized she wanted to \u201cadvocate\u201d for Jeanette.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started to feel very aligned with Jeanette. She feels to me like a there-but-for-the-grace-go-I character. To be a woman in that particular time period, having to live up to the archetypal constraints of wife and mother that are so narrowly defined,\u201d Kazan said by phone. \u201cThere was something about that that felt very poignant to me, very important.\u201d<\/p>\n

That Mulligan was right for a messier character, Kazan says, was clear from performances in Steve McQueen’s \u201cShame\u201d and her stage work. Echoing widespread praise for Mulligan’s performance in \u201cWildfire,\u201d The New Yorker wrote: \u201cMulligan casts aside her natural sweetness to bring us a soured soul, driven only by the courage of her confusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe’s like a prima ballerina,\u201d says Kazan. \u201cShe’s so precise. You can ask her to do anything because she has that ineffable thing that you can’t buy or train of an audience feeling empathy for her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mulligan also recently challenged herself by starring in the one-woman show \u201cGirls & Boys,\u201d in both London and New York. She played a mother of two telling a story that begins comically before turning dark and violent. Mulligan’s character was listed simply as \u201cWoman.\u201d Laughing, she calls the one-woman play \u201ca bucket-list thing that I’m so glad I did and I’ll never do it again.\u201d<\/p>\n

At 33, Mulligan exudes a serenity despite her predilection for more tortured spirits. Even her defensiveness about her famous husband has ebbed some. \u201cIt used to strike fear into my heart if someone said, ‘So you’re married to Marcus?\u201d’ Mulligan says. \u201cI’d be like: ‘Ahh!’ and jump out the window. But now I’m like, ‘Yeah. Married for, like, kind of long time.’ It doesn’t freak me out anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if Mulligan’s life is steady, she’s driven as an actor for the opposite.<\/p>\n

\u201cI kind of don’t want to do anything too earnest. I maybe don’t want to play the heroine anymore,\u201d Mulligan says. \u201c’Suffragette’ and ‘Madding Crowd’ \u2013 they are pretty much well-intentioned, noble-cause. I loved that Jeanette is the total opposite. She’s the complete anti-heroine. Everything in her hands gets f—– up.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TORONTO \u2013 Carey Mulligan is a letter writer. As a young woman with acting aspirations, she wrote to Kenneth Branagh …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":185875,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","mauthors-jake-coyle","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}