For many people, actress Carey Mulligan, she of the uniquely colored alto voice and watchful gaze, came out of nowhere with “An Education,” for which she was Oscar-nominated as the daring London schoolgirl who gets mixed up with an older man.
The run-up to last year’s awards season — months of it, full of interviews and red-carpet sound bites and 17-weeks-to-go! prediction pieces — “seemed to go on forever and ever,” she says. Then she took some time off. The most, in fact, since she turned 18, seven years ago.
In “Never Let Me Go,” now in Chicago theaters, Mulligan plays a clone in an alternate-universe society representing a particularly chilling version of utopia. Last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, we talked about the project, which she filmed in an extended blur in between “An Education” and “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” also now in theaters.
Rather than speculative fiction, she considers “Never Let Me Go” “simply about a search for love, your place in the world, and what you do with the time you have.” She continues: “Cathy’s in every scene, but she says the least. And even the inner monologue we hear — and the script was brilliant at this — wasn’t reliable. Even there she’s sort of lying to herself all the way through. She diminishes her feelings at every turn, even when she’s devastated.
“When I was doing this film I experimented with being a very clean-living person. I don’t smoke anyway, but I didn’t drink for about two months either side of shooting it. And I ate very … cleanly. It was all part of feeling like you were meant for some higher purpose, like the characters we were playing.”
One of Mulligan’s co-stars in “Never Let Me Go” has tasted the blockbuster franchise life; Keira Knightley turned over a fair percentage of her young career to the filming of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” trilogy. Another co-star, Andrew Garfield (also onscreen this week in “The Social Network”), is about to get his taste: He’s the new Spider-Man. Mulligan says she’s content with her work so far, mostly in independent film.
She’s going back to the stage next year in New York, with an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 film “Through a Glass Darkly.” (It originated in London, but Mulligan didn’t do it there.) Stage work, she says, helps take “the pressure off working consistently in film all the time.”
Has she ever optioned a book or a script with herself in mind? “I’ve definitely thought about it, because there’s not a huge amount out there for women,” she says.
Therein lies the paradox. Even in the indie world, a talent as formidable as Mulligan’s can have a difficult time finding roles worthy of her time and attention.
“Never Let Me Go” is in theaters.
