Carey Mulligan covers the latest issue of Net-a-Porter’s digital pub Porter, and inside, she opens up about her life before children, the #MeToo movement and toxic masculinity.
MOTHERHOOD
The 34-year-old, who is starring in the new film Promising Young Women, and shares Evelyn, 4, and Wilfred, 2, with husband Marcus Mumford, 33, says she doesn’t miss her pre-child life at all: “I haven't been in a bar in ages, and I’m very glad of that.”
She says she’s spending time bonding with her female friends: “My female friendships have become increasingly important — particularly the ones with friends I made when I was 14 at school.”
#METOO
Mulligan plays Cassie in Promising Young Women, and she has a traumatic backstory that leads to a double life where she pretends to be drunk in order to lure would-be date rapists into attempting to take advantage.
The film is helmed by Killing Eve showrunner Emerald Fennell. She says of Fennell’s vision: “Emerald’s [point] was: if [you] take someone home and they are really drunk, and then that person reveals they are not drunk, and you feel guilty, then you know what you are doing isn’t right. What we reflected on, making this film, was the amount of real-life stories like this we know. A lot of this film is stuff that pretty much every woman I know has experienced in some way.”
Mulligan says that she has seen reverberations from the #MeToo movement in Hollywood: “The first concrete measure I saw was doing a play at the Royal Court called Girls & Boys. They gave us a document that was a code of conduct. It was funny because I was the only person in the play,” she recalls. “But the director, the assistant director and writer, we all had to read and sign it. I had never had that in my career. If that had been going on when I started at 18, it would have felt different. Now, I really think it would be wild for something to happen on set. No one would turn a blind eye.”