Carey Mulligan is not here for actors who pretend to be above the awards season hype.
The Maestro actress, 38, who is nominated for her third Academy Award for Best Actress, told The Sunday Times in an interview published on Saturday, February 3, that being nominated is “just the coolest thing because it’s from your peers.”
“It’s wicked,” she added. “And the thousands — literally — of actors that I’ve met who say that awards don’t matter and that it’s the work that counts? They are 100 percent lying.”
Mulligan also shared her frustration about Greta Gerwig being snubbed for Best Director, even though her Barbie film earned nods for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.
“I’m gutted for Greta because I don’t know what else you can do as a director to get nominated,” she said. “You make a critically acclaimed film that’s also an incredible global success, and yet you don’t get nominated?”
Bradley Cooper and Mulligan costar as American composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre, in Maestro. The 2023 film, Cooper also directed and cowrote with Josh Singer, was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor.
Cooper, 49, recalled his first meeting with Mulligan as “dramatic” on an episode of The Graham Norton Show in January. “Carey was in a one-woman show, and I went backstage to meet her and realized something was not right and I insisted on taking her to the emergency room,” he said.
Mulligan added that during her performance, “a bit of set” hit her in the head. “I carried on, but when it was over, I started crying and thought I was a goner,” she shared. “I was sobbing on the floor when Bradley turned up and, realizing I wasn’t OK, he took me to the hospital. You can imagine how delighted the nurse was!”
Cooper saw Mulligan in a medical emergency on the set of Maestro, as well. The Saltburn actress said she got sick and the doctor did not believe she was pregnant due to the heavy prosthetics.
“I was quite ill on set and a doctor was called to give me antibiotics. When I told him I was 12 weeks pregnant, he was not at all convinced,” Mulligan explained, adding that she didn’t realize she was “still made up to look 57 years old,” thus causing confusion for the doctor. “I couldn’t wait to tell the makeup artists how good they were.”
After the success of Maestro, Cooper couldn’t help but rave about Mulligan’s performance.
“It was my hope when I started to realize what movie I wanted to write and explore, that there would be an actress that could fulfill that, and then Carey not only fulfilled it, but allowed me to explore cinematically in ways that I wouldn’t know. If she wasn’t able to just be, I would say, almost transcendent, so that the camera, that the movie wants to stay on her,” Cooper told Deadline in a January interview.
Cooper went on to say that Mulligan “commandeered” her part in the film the way he had imagined.
