When Carey Mulligan was preparing for her role in Beef, she had some feedback about the insults. The second season of the Netflix anthology series, which creator Lee Sung Jin describes as part Sopranos, part Ingmar Bergman, traffics in a dirty, delicious fight between Oscar Isaac’s country club manager Josh and his wife, Lindsay, played by Mulligan. But Mulligan was worried that some of the obscenities felt too American. “I wrote Sonny [Lee] a list of really awful British swear words — just all the shit things that we say to each other,” she says. “I was like, ‘I should definitely call someone a cunt.’ ”
The Beef gig came shortly after Mulligan wrapped promotion for Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, a black-and-white Leonard Bernstein biopic that called for subtle performances and the slow agonizing death of Mulligan’s character, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein. At that point, she’d done nearly everything a “Serious Actress” could do: British period pieces. Folksy Coen brothers indies. Important stories about the origins of the suffragette and #MeToo movements. She had three Oscar nominations. But she’d never done a true comedy, and her oeuvre wasn’t reflective of her off-camera personality. Her friend and collaborator Emerald Fennell describes her as “naughty”; Beef offered her a chance to show that side to the world.
“I was delighted that she punches someone in the face,” she says over breakfast at the Hotel Bel-Air, where she’s staying but not really sleeping (she lives outside London and jet lag had her up most of the night scrolling photos of the three children she shares with musician Marcus Mumford). When Mulligan learned about an episode five turn that called for her character to kill a coyote in cold blood, she was completely hooked. “I called my agent immediately and was like, ‘There’s this fucking bit with a coyote, I’ve got to do it.’ ”
Fans of season one of Beef will recall that the ever-escalating feud between Ali Wong’s and Steven Yeun’s characters kicked off with a minor bit of road rage. This time, it’s a full-on brawl between Mulligan and Isaac, caught on video by Josh’s Gen Z employees (played by Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny). The recording gives them blackmail power over a couple they believe has everything they want — money, mainly, but also the happiness it’s supposed to buy — and Lindsay and Josh’s facade frays quickly.
For the viewers who have been watching Mulligan perform the role of Serious Actress for 20 years, Beef will also feel a bit revelatory. Despite being an A-list actress, she’s escaped the tabloid machinery and skirted the celebrity industrial complex. Between Suffragette, Promising Young Woman and She Said, she spent years being asked to speak on the issues of feminism and sexual assault but rarely her own life. In Beef, her issues are more grounded and personal: wanting children, wanting a divorce, wanting a facelift. In fact, what unites nearly all of the characters across both seasons is a desperate belief that if they could just get that one thing — a new job, a new face, a baby — everything would start falling into place. It’s an easy pretext to ask Mulligan if she’s ever felt the same.
Mulligan’s answer is, unfortunately, she hasn’t.
She grew up outside of London and describes her early life as very comfortable and lovely but not of the same posh social strata in which she currently resides. Her mother, who is Welsh, was a university lecturer, and her father, originally from Liverpool, worked his way up from bussing tables at a hotel restaurant to running the business. They weren’t part of the entertainment industry, but art wasn’t out of reach. Mulligan’s mother took her to the theater often, and actor and writer Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, came to give a talk about acting at her high school that helped her decide to apply to drama school. She auditioned for the prestigious English conservatories RADA, Guildhall and LAMDA but was rejected from all three. “It actually didn’t feel like the end of the world because I saw how competitive it was,” she says. “And I also used a Sarah Kane piece about suicide for my monologue — that isn’t exactly a crowd-pleaser.”
At her parents’ urging, she accepted a spot studying English at another university and then took a gap year pulling pints at 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 operating an open call for the 2005 Keira Knightley-Matthew MacFadyen-starring production of Pride & Prejudice, and the call to play Kitty Bennet came in shortly before Mulligan was due at university. That role led to a play at London’s Royal Court Theatre, then a six-month gig on the Dickens adaptation Bleak House and then an episode of Doctor Who. “By that point, I realized, ‘Oh, this is probably my job.’ ” She never considered being a celebrity. “My expectation was to roll on doing supporting parts in TV, plays if I could, and tiny parts in film.”
But then she got the lead role in An Education. What began as a niche British movie about a May-December romance with a microbudget — “craft service was a tea and a packet of biscuits,” she notes — gained major critical traction, scoring Mulligan a surprise best actress nomination and newfound fame. Awards campaigning, alongside such A-list nominees as Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren and Sandra Bullock, was disorienting. She wasn’t comfortable in her body, and the process of red carpets and photo shoots felt sort of freakish. (“Having my first child fixed that for me,” she says. “Suddenly standing around in your pants is not so awful because you’ve done way worse in front of doctors and midwives.”) She says she basically disassociated during her first Academy Awards. When she returned in 2024 for Maestro, she couldn’t believe how much smaller it all felt. She arrived late (traffic!) and wound up watching the monologue from the wings with the theater staff. “I had this vantage point of the audience, and I was looking out at all these brilliant artists, and it was actually just a group of people I’ve known for a long time.”
She met co-star Isaac in 2010, on the set of the noir action flick Drive. Mulligan starred opposite Ryan Gosling; Issac played her absentee husband. She stayed in the guest room of director Nicolas Winding Refn’s house in the Hollywood Hills while they did night shoots in downtown. “The first time I ever met Carey was in Nick’s living room before we started shooting, and I remember it was exciting because we were both young and really on the cusp of something,” says Isaac. “That feeling lasted about a week, and then we became jaded. But it was great.”
When Mulligan was 25, she ran into her old camp friend Marcus Mumford — his band Mumford & Sons was on the rise — at a concert in Nashville, and they started dating. A year later, they were married. “I was conscious that it would be perceived by people as being young to get married, but I was like, ‘Well, we’ve known each other forever, so it doesn’t count,” she says. They’re a very public couple; they walk red carpets together, and Mulligan often is in the crowd at his concerts. “I went with him to perform on SNL recently, and it was so nerve-racking, but it’s also fun, as my whole job that day was just to tell them they’re doing great,” she says.
But she also tries to grasp the little privacies where she can. In Beef, her character carries on a secret text relationship with an ex. “The backstory we created was that she’d gone to university and met a minor royal, and they’d dated for only a month, but she wound up in the tabloids a lot, which gave her social currency,” says Mulligan. During early edits of the season, Lee used Mumford’s headshot as the avatar whenever their WhatsApp messages appeared, and paparazzi shots of the real-life couple flashed onscreen when the character googled their fling. “We didn’t want to have to photoshop anything, so it was just easier for us to grab these real pictures of Carey at that age,” says Lee. “It got to the point where I needed to ask her permission to use Marcus’ pictures in the final version, and she was like, ‘Actually, I’d rather not.’ ” Instead, Mulligan offered up her best friend, director Rightor Doyle (they met through mutual friend Zoe Kazan). The two were papped constantly when Mulligan was in her early 20s and living in New York for The Seagull. “The photos are awful, but there are loads of them,” she says.
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While Mulligan’s star power rose in the years after An Education, it often was hard to find parts that were more than just the WAGs, and she had to sift through a lot of scripts for something meatier. “You can spot it a mile off when someone’s just in the movie to serve that kind of purpose, so you can quickly be like, ‘Oh, that’s just a girlfriend.’ ” Mulligan has been with her U.K. agent, Victoria Belfrage, since she was 18, and that’s helped to buffer her from needing to fall into the “one for them, one for me” mentality that often pervades the industry. But it wasn’t foolproof. She played plenty of wives and girlfriends in movies about men: in Inside Llewyn Davis, Drive, The Great Gatsby. “If there’s a great director or a great writer, and it feels like there’s an opening to do something slightly more interesting, that’s when I’ll jump in,” she says.
Fennell came calling in 2018. She was looking for a lead actress for her debut feature, Promising Young Woman, a date-rape revenge thriller, and needed someone with an emotional gravitas to help ground the heightened world of the film. “I’d met Carey once at a friend’s house, and like all the people I love, she is hot and cold,” says Fennell. “I don’t mean alternately — I mean she is simultaneously a blast of sunshine with an icy stillness.” Mulligan knew it was going to be a big swing, but she found she trusted Fennell’s decision-making enough to go for it. The ending is provocative; the script called for her character’s suffocation at the hands of her late best friend’s rapist, and Fennell planned to film for the exact length of time that it would realistically take to die. “We never see the true grimness of something like that,” says Fennell. According to her father-in-law, a former cop, she needed two and a half minutes.
Mulligan insisted on doing it herself, without the use of a body double. Though there were safety protocols in place, it was risky. “The problem is, if you’re literally putting a pillow on someone’s face and they’re literally pretending to suffocate for several minutes, your margin of error is very slim,” says Fennell. There was a take that went too far, and though their hand signal warning system worked, it took Mulligan a beat to even understand what was happening to her and give the signal. Mulligan stepped outside and cried quickly, then came back in to do another take. (The trauma of that scene gone wrong didn’t last long. Mulligan decided to be her own body double for the next take, when Max Greenfield and Chris Lowell console each other as her body lies limp next to them. “I was there with a pillow sitting on my head as they’re bro-ing out,” she says, “and it was immediately quite funny, so that cleansed the whole thing.”)
Her instincts aren’t borne merely out of a good attitude but rather a desire to avoid her own pet peeve: actors who can’t just “fucking get on with it.” She hates when people are late, or don’t know their lines, or aren’t considerate of the crew. She tried to model her own behavior as No. 1 on the call sheet after the women she worked with early on: She was shocked to see that Judi Dench knew every single person’s name on the set of Pride & Prejudice, and there was a day when An Education ran over by 45 minutes and Emma Thompson bought everyone pizza and beer to make up for it.
The timing of Promising Young Woman, premiering to big buzz at Sundance in 2020 and then languishing in pandemic purgatory before ultimately getting dumped onto VOD, was a disappointment. When that year’s awards season came around, everyone involved was so stressed by the whole process that Mumford offered a bet: If Mulligan was snubbed for an Oscar nomination, she would have to get a tattoo of a statuette; if she scored, he would get inked. (He now has three Oscar statuettes for each of her noms.) Afterward, Mulligan never felt the need to keep her lead-role streak intact. “I love getting called up from the bench for a two-week shift on something really great,” she says.
That’s how she wound up in Fennell’s next project, Saltburn; she read the script as a friend and then immediately asked to play the (small) part of Poor Dear Pamela. She read Wuthering Heights early, too, but refrained from asking to join. “I was like, [Emerald and I] will cook something else up, and it’s nice to leave some space so that people don’t think, ‘Oh, them again.’ ”
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On the first day of filming Beef, Mulligan felt a little unsure about the tone. “I kept being like, ‘Are we meant to be funny?’ ” she says. “There were lines that just ruined me, like when we’re fighting, and Oscar says to me, ‘You wear wonderful dresses, and you drive a nice car, and we had dinner with Bono.’ Every time he did it, I just broke.”
Says Lee: “What’s incredible about Carey is that her radar for bullshit is the most precise I’ve ever seen in my life.” He points to a scene early on in the season, when she’s fighting with the country club’s tennis instructor, and an errant napkin, lifted just so by the breeze, hits her square in the face. “I didn’t have to tell her, ‘Hey, let’s lean into the comedy,’ because she plays everything so grounded that of course she’s going to just play it off like nothing happens,” he says. “And the more grounded it is, the funnier it’s going to be.” During post, he noticed how much she was doing with just her eyes — that she could bring new levels of vindictiveness with a single look. “I sent her numerous texts to be like, ‘How do you do this?’ And she was like, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ ” he says with a laugh.
The two actors had spent months preparing for the show. They completed an intensive workshop in which they worked out the details of their fictional 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 set, which she lovingly describes as “cringe.” It’s a bit of a habit: She also got a tattoo to commemorate Suffragette, the historical drama she made with Helena Bonham Carter and Anne-Marie Duff — a quote from the film, love that overcometh. “I asked the other actresses to come get it with me after wrap, and they all said no.”)
Mulligan and Issac also rehearsed the big physical fight scene ad nauseam. “My own confrontation style is that, if I’m with the person I’m angry with, I go silent,” says Mulligan. “But if that person is not there, I will rant and rant to whoever will listen. To the point that my husband will have to be like, ‘OK, we covered that.’ ”
On the day, Mulligan found she couldn’t quite get there. The script called for her character to throw a wine glass toward Isaac’s head, escalating things into a grapple with a golf club. “I was supposed to say something about how I was going to sleep with everyone else at the club, and I just didn’t feel angry enough,” she says. “But then Sonny came over and said, ‘I don’t think you want to say that. I think you want to say to him that you’ve wasted my whole life.’ And I was like, ‘Yep, that’s what she’s mad about.’ ”
After promoting Beef, Mulligan will go back home to Devon to decompress before Mumford launches his next tour (she’ll join him, with the children, for the shows that coincide with school breaks). The town, and their home on a working farm, is a far cry from the star-studded environs of the Hotel Bel-Air. She’s the only famous person in her friend group, and it offers what she describes as an antidote to the self-obsession one can develop as an actor. “I was going on to a friend about One Battle After Another, saying it’s the greatest thing I’ve seen in the last 10 years, and she was like, ‘Who’s in it?’ ” she says with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn.’ And she said, ‘Which one’s that? Is he from Shaun of the Dead?’ I was like, ‘I can’t fucking believe you don’t know who Sean Penn is, but also, God, that’s great. Here I am worrying about what people are going to think of my show or how they’re going to compare it to other things, and my best mate is like, ‘Who’s Sean Penn?’ ”
But Mulligan makes no claims to normalcy. Before we say goodbye, she shows me photos on her phone from a recent ceremony at Windsor Castle commemorating her new title of CBE, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (it’s a selfie in which she’s wearing the medal as a brooch). “I’ve been lording it over Oscar in all our joint interviews,” she says. And, given her favorite line from the show, I can’t resist asking: Has she ever had dinner with Bono? “Oh, well, yeah,” she says with a smirk.
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