Carey Mulligan on Being Bold in the Face of Rejection

Carey Mulligan was rejected from several drama schools when she was a teenager. But instead of giving up, she sent a letter to a famous actor she’d met once. That letter led to a networking dinner, then to her first audition for “Pride and Prejudice.” Today, Carey shares how being bold in the face of rejection landed her in films on the big screen. In this episode, Carey shares: 

• Why she reached out to Julian Fellowes for advice on pursuing acting

• How she navigated the industry without formal training or experience

• The hardest play she’s ever done – and why her director almost canceled it

• Why doing a press tour 3.5 weeks after having her kid helped her postpartum depression

• Her favorite episode of her new Amazon-exclusive podcast, "I Hear Fear"

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On the Hardest Thing She’s Done in Her Career

Carey: About four years ago, I did a monologue called “Girls and Boys” that we did at the Royal Court Theater in London and then took to New York. And it was just an hour and a half of me on stage. I was telling the story about this woman in her life. Then, the curtain would come up. I would act in these scenes with these imaginary children. So you wouldn't hear obviously what the children were saying. But I was having full conversations and often disagreements and fights and playing with these two children that you couldn’t see. I've never had stage fright in a real way – and I still can't really distinguish whether it was stage fright or whether it was anxiety – but it took me until the first dress rehearsal to be able to perform more than a page of the play until that point. They were ready to cancel the whole thing because every time I tried to do a run of the show, I would have a full panic and I'd hyperventilate and I'd sort of walk off stage. It took me lots of meditation, they sent me to all sorts of doctors to try and see if they could calm me down. Eventually it got to the dress rehearsal and I got the most important people in my life to come and just sit in the audience and managed to make it halfway through the play. By the opening night, I could do the whole thing. And then I did it for six weeks in London and six weeks in New York. That was…I dunno. It blindsided me like no kind of fear I'd had before. 

On Navigating the Industry Early in Her Career

Carey: For the first couple of years, I kind of had the privilege of just getting to play supporting parts and things where there was no pressure on me. But I was also surrounded by incredible British character actors, better theater actors, and screen actors. My first job was with Donald Sutherland, Judi Dench, and Brenda Blethyn — these extraordinary actors. So I got to watch and learn. I was less thinking about the next steps and just going from job to job, figuring out how to build my confidence within it. Because not getting into drama school and landing a job, I did spend the first sort of four or five years feeling really unqualified to do what I was doing.