Vogue

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The Talented Miss Mulligan The star of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Never Let Me Go, Carey Mulligan, has gone from indie darling to Hollywood’s new face. By Joan Juliet Buck.

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arey Mulligan at 25 is poised between two worlds. In 2008 she was known as perhaps the best Nina ever seen in Chekhov’s The Seagull, in London and on Broadway. In 2009 she charmed audiences as a sixties London teenager in An Education, and ricocheted between Europe and America collecting fourteen awards and twelve nominations, including one for the Oscar as Best Actress. Her next two films opened this September. In Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Oliver Stone’s fierce cautionary tale about the flameout of capitalism, she plays Gordon Gekko’s tough-minded daughter, Winnie. Though she claims the personal story takes second place to the business drama, she is the emotional heart of the movie. But that’s nothing compared to the controlled, transcendent performance she gives in Never Let Me Go, a small, devastating film perfectly adapted by Alex Garland from Kazuo Ishiguro’s chilling masterpiece, and directed by Mark Romanek. Right now she’s a fresh English rose. By this month she will be recognized as one of the great talents, with an exceptional ability to convey profound emotional depth.

Since Oscar season, which she considered “unreal,” Carey has been happily leading a real, and private, life with Shia LaBeouf, whom she met during the Wall Street sequel. She’s firm about the firewall they agreed to erect around them. They are sometimes caught outdoors by paparazzi but attend movie galas alone. “Posing on the red carpet feels like you’re selling something that has nothing to do with you. If you do it with someone else, it’s like we’re saying, ‘Oh! We come as a pair! Would you like to buy both of us? We’re available for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs!’ ” Quick, curious, and genial, Carey turned my series of days with her in Los Angeles into a marathon dawdle. She didn’t shop, though we wandered into many stores. She travels light but not alone: Her iPod is filled with Laura Marling, Kate Rusby, and Emilíana Torrini. She Googles whatever she needs—poem, reference, fact—and hunts down plays in bookstores. In Borders she noticed a terrible aisle of empty shelves labeled fiction, and next to it an aisle of graphic novels overflowing with readers.

Her tastes are pure pop: At an early read-through of Never Let Me Go, she impressed her costar Andrew Garfield with her lack of pretension. “We were asked to name our favorite films, and everyone was showing off about which Michael Haneke they loved the most. Carey said, ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,’ and I woke up.”

Zoe Kazan, who was Masha in The Seagull in New York and became a close friend, was struck at first meeting by Carey’s “delicacy, real joyousness, and impish, mischievous charm. I expected some flower of an ingenue who would have no backbone and no humor, and Carey was the opposite of that.” Almost her first words when we met at Shutters on the Beach were “I want to be in Glee, but I’m told I’m not famous enough to be a cameo yet.”

She arrived in a striped sweater, long-limbed and elegant despite a giant rip below one knee of her Prada trousers. The short haircut that invited comparisons to Audrey Hepburn was growing out;

the dimples that made her look like a child were still there. Last time she was in London, she was carded while trying to buy paracetamol, which is basically Tylenol, and had to leave emptyhanded. There was talk of taking a trapeze lesson, baking a cake, riding a bike along the beach, swap meets, and nursery gardens.

Her unspoken intention was simply to lollygag from place to place, with a kind of inner north that often led to hotel gardens.

She drove her Prius over to Venice, where she stood for a long time admiring a checked dress in the window of Pamela Barish’s Abbot Kinney shop. “That’s a really good dress,” she said.

Over lunch at Lilly’s in Venice, in the poised voice of a stage actress twice her age, she asked the waiter what rib eye was and admitted the most she ever spent on a dress was £500—for a Jasmine di Milo before Sundance, her first festival. She’s got great taste; carefully avoiding anything “above the knee, tight, girly, or ridiculous,” she chooses chic and often witty gala dresses from Prada, Lanvin, and Vionnet. For the Oscars, she wore a Prada hung with miniature knives, forks, and scissors. The cyclamen strapless Lanvin she wore to the Screen Actors Guild awards is a

“I don’t want to be ‘known’—I’m afraid of being a ‘personality.’”

—Carey Mulligan good memory: “I met and fell head over heels in love with Alber Elbaz—he was the sweetest, funniest, down-to-earth, not-intimidating, lovely man.” She loved the Vionnet she wore to the BAFTAs. Away from the lights, it’s Urban Outfitters and Burberrys.

The swirl of swag that attends an actress’s rise leaves her pretty indifferent. She has turned down fashion-advertising campaigns, and the only jewelry she wears is a tiny gold bracelet with a dangling C, a gift from her publicists, Jess and Nicole. She hangs out with her girlfriends. Although she’s been in Los Angeles the better part of a year, she hasn’t succumbed to the imperative to become a preemptively Photoshopped Spanx-and-Botox version of herself.

Five feet seven and 119 pounds, she works out with a trainer who once asked, “Who do you want to look like?” “I said, ‘I don’t want to look like an actress; I want to look like a person.’ Normal people don’t go to the gym six times a week.

“The thinnest I’ve ever been was after I had my appendix out, during the London run of The Seagull. I went down to 112 pounds and realized my brain doesn’t work when I’m that thin, so I can’t do my job. That’s why, when I came out here, I never had that whole Hollywood pressure thing. I never said I wanted to be a lead actress; I never said I wanted to be a film actress.

This need to trump everyone bewilders me. I’m only 25. I’m not better than anyone. I just want to watch other people and learn to be good.”

The adjective she uses for real praise is solid—a solid performer, a solid poem, a solid role. She comes from a solid background.

Her parents met when they were both working in a hotel in Amman. When she was born, her father ran the Mayfair Hotel in

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London. Three years later he took over the InterContinental in Hannover, then in Düsseldorf. They lived in hotel-manager apartments at the top of the hotels. “It sounds like you’re living in a great mansion, but the staff don’t work for you; everyone works for everyone else. We were part of a team, like mini waiters.”

“I don’t want to bore anybody.

I’m not strategic; I’ve never done

”

anything I didn’t want to do.

—Carey Mulligan

Carey and her older brother, Owain, were under strict orders from their Welsh mother, Nano, to keep their rooms tidy. They spoke German, played in the laundry rooms, lost guinea pigs behind radiators, ate Wiener schnitzel from room service. “They weren’t roller-skating around the lobby,” says Nano Mulligan.

READY FOR ANYTHING One of Mulligan’s favorite lines of poetry from Keats: “I was never afraid of failure for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.” Director, Mark Romanek, on the phone from London, said, “I’ve never encountered a talent like Carey’s. There’s no template for doing this kind of deeply resonant minimalism.”

When she was six, Owain was cast in The King and I at the International School in Düsseldorf, and soon Carey was as well, her blonde hair dyed black. When her father went to run the InterContinental in Vienna, she was sent to boarding school in England. At Woldingham, she was passionate about school plays and acted the men’s parts. Which was fine; she didn’t do girly, and the men’s parts were better. Her favorite film was Home Alone: “I wanted to be Macaulay Culkin.” She also wanted to be Daniel Day-Lewis.

At sixteen she threw a superhero party, dressed as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Leonardo, with a papier-mâché shell on her back. Her friends all came as Catwoman.

Julian Fellowes came to the school to talk about the writing and making of Gosford Park. She asked him for advice on becoming an actress. He said, “Marry a lawyer.”

Instead, at seventeen, Carey applied to London drama schools without telling her parents, and was rejected for being too young.

Her choice of a monologue from 4.48 Psychosis, written by Sarah Kane shortly before she killed herself, didn’t help. She did get representation: Tor Belfrage, who remains her U.K. agent. “She was just out of school, and adorable. I thought, Let’s go for this. I keep thinking I’m still taller than she is.”

She found jobs: assisted her parents’ cleaning lady around the neighborhood; made lists and ran errands at Ealing Studios, hoping to get noticed; and, at eighteen, also became a barmaid at night. “There were two pubs, the French Horn and the Three Pigeons. I looked twelve and was saying, ‘No more for you’ to 45-year-old men. Christmas Eve was crazy; I loved the manic speed of everything. The Three Pigeons regulars would help me think up a new name—Catherine de Najarc or Catherine Hatherley. Carey Mulligan’s a ridiculous name for an actress.”

Her only training was weekend improvisation workshops. Julian Fellowes’s wife hooked her up with an audition for Pride and Prejudice. While changing a barrel in the basement of the pub, she phoned her parents in Austria with the news that she was cast as Kitty Bennet. Before she went to work as Keira Knightley’s sister,

Brenda Blethyn’s daughter, she carried on as barmaid for a few weeks—“beaming ecstatically at each customer as I said, ‘Here’s your wine!’

“When I was fifteen, I’d had vivid dreams of acting with Judi Dench—it was never Tom Cruise, always Judi Dench. I’d wake up and go, ‘Not real!’ and then I’d cry. The first day of Pride and Prejudice, there was Judi Dench.” At nineteen she costarred in the BBC’s wonderful serial version of Bleak House, as the orphan Ada Clare. She was still only 21 when she took the impossible role of Nina, opposite Kristin Scott Thomas’s Arkadina in The Seagull, directed by Ian Rickson at London’s Royal Court.

“I’ve never had anything bad happen to me; I’ve never had my heart broken; I’ve never had any drama; I don’t have anything gutwrenching to use. Ian is a brilliant director: He’d place one thought in my head, and I’d have a whole spectrum of stuff to mess about with. He said, ‘Build your own world; don’t use your own life.’ I made a book full of quotes, pictures, and poetry for Nina, as if it were my university thesis, my qualification for playing the part.

I can only invent by drawing on what other, brilliant people have written that I can’t write or articulate as brilliantly, and when I read it, it becomes my own.

“It’s crazy,” said Carey, “the best nights were when I’d come offstage with no memory at all of what had happened. I don’t know what happened to the audience—but I believed every single second. You can get completely lost in The Seagull.” Echoing what Meryl Streep said 30 years ago, she added, “It’s like putting on a hat—I leave it in the car on the way home.”Kristin Scott Thomas is full of praise. “It was close to the knuckle being Arkadina to her Nina—she’s the next generation of young actress, and she’s fantastic: You have to be world-weary to play Chekhov, and she was able to conjure that up. She can empathize.”

The British papers called her “extraordinarily radiating,” “almost unbearably affecting,” “exquisite.” In The New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote that her “delectably dewy but determined Nina captures the raw hunger within Nina’s ambition, the ravening vitality as well as the vulnerability.” If I wanted to be in Santa Monica at 10:30, I’d leave at 8:00.” When Warren Beatty met her for a project and found out about the buses, he took to chauffeuring her around in his Mercedes. He’s not the first older-man friend; she bonded with her costar Denis Lawson, Mr. Jarndyce in Bleak House, and they have regular lunches at the Wolseley in London, followed by hat-buying expeditions at James Lock & Co. “After An Education, the challenge is proving I’m not a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who likes older men,” she said. In the last year, many projects were rumored; only one has stayed firm, the adaptation

of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. “I don’t want to bore anybody.

I’m not strategic; I’ve never done anything I didn’t want to do.”

Over crab wrapped in pearlescent pancakes, Mulligan explained the hovering: “My agents sat me down after Never Let Me Go and said, ‘You have to find a way to be happy not working.’ I worry about repeating myself. I’m afraid of anything remotely period, afraid of anything to do with the sixties or playing a schoolgirl or playing someone with pretension. I don’t want to be the British girl who wears corsets. I want to play someone nasty.” The fact that practically no independent or human-scale films are being financed right now is limiting the choice. “It’ll sort itself out,” she said. “Carey’s probably going to go on forever,” says Kristin Scott Thomas. “She really does have the world in her hands. It’s good she’s not working, taking her time, not rushing into being a product. Hollywood is so . . . industrial.”

Carey wanted to do theater again. Saint Joan. Romeo and Juliet, perhaps? “I want to get stuff out, go toward whatever it is that makes me spend hours on the Internet, trying to find words that move me.” She found it: an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s film Through a Glass Darkly for the New York stage.

“I don’t want to be ‘known’—I’m afraid of being a ‘personality.’

On a talk show, I feel I should just hold up a sign with the facts on it—and leave. It wouldn’t take more than a minute, and they’d have room for other guests. I want people to not recognize me, to think I’m a different actress, not remember me from what I did previously. If people have all those other pictures and stories associated with you, it’s added shit that means they have to work harder to believe you as a character.”

On the way to see Never Let Me Go, there was a short visit to her makeup artist, Georgie’s, flat to say hello to a puppy. If she could have managed to go to Whole Foods and the dry cleaners as well, she would have. We had both seen the film before, but now it was finished, the music by Rachel Portman complete. Nano Mulligan read Never Let Me Go when it came out in paperback and gave it to Carey. “I’ve never been as sure of anything,” Carey said.

At Hashimoto, the oldest nursery garden in Los Angeles, between fuchsias and rosebushes, down an alley of agapanthus, Carey casually righted two heavy potted trees lying on their sides. “I want birdhouses,” she said, “a wall of birdhouses.” At Yamaguchi next door, there were hummingbird feeders. Most of them looked like bongs. Carey found one made of an upended tequila bottle and bought it to hang in the friend’s garden where she was planting the seeds of her choice: tomatoes, edamame, sunflowers, onions, carrots, strawberries, watermelons, and peppers.

Victory-garden stuff. Practical. Minimal. Prudent. Eccentric.

Inspired.

CAREY’S FILMOGRAPHY

SILLY SISTER As Catherine (Kitty) Bennet in the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice.

BRIGHT SCHOOLGIRL As Jenny, the central character in 2009 An Education.

WOMAN OF ACTION As Winnie Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 2010 cationary tale Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

THE VOICE OF HUMANITY As Kathy H in the 2010 screen adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

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