CAREY MULLIGAN
A Promising Best Actress Contender
British star Carey Mulligan looks poised to break into the Best Actress race at this year’s Academy Awards for her performance in Emerald Fennell’s poppy revenge flick Promising Young Woman. And she certainly deserves it. Mulligan delivers a multi-layered, electric performance as Cassie Thomas, a young woman who dropped out of medical school after a tragic incident, and now spends her nights trolling bars for predatory men to whom she can teach a lesson. When she reconnects with a fellow classmate, she decides it’s time to focus her efforts on the people who wronged her in the first place.
Although Mulligan has been acting professionally since 2005, she played Kitty Bennet in the Joe Wright adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, her real breakthrough didn’t come until 2009 when she was cast as Jenny Mellor in An Education. The film followed, set in the 1960s, the relationship between 16-year-old Mellor and a playboy/conman years older than her (Peter Sarsgaard). For her performance, Mulligan won a BAFTA Award for Best Actress, and she received her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
Mulligan may be getting all the recognition right now for Promising Young Woman, but that’s not her only leading role from this past year. She also starred in the upcoming Netflix historical drama, and far cry from Promising Young Woman, The Dig. In The Dig, Mulligan plays Edith Pretty, an English widow who hires a self-taught archaeologist (Ralph Fiennes) to excavate a group of mysterious mounds on her property. This venture unearths two grave sites that date back to the 6th and 7th centuries. The Dig comes out on Netflix on January 29, 2021.
She is currently in pre-production on a new music biography called Maestro. The movie will follow Leonard Bernstein’s (Bradley Cooper) rise to fame. Mulligan is starring as Felicia Montealegre, a Chilean actress who was married to Bernstein from 1951 until her death in 1978. Mark Strong will also star alongside Mulligan and Cooper as famous art critic and historian, John Gruen. In addition to starring as Bernstein, Cooper is directing the picture from a script he co-wrote with Josh Singer. This will mark Cooper’s sophomore directorial project, following up his massively successful A Star is Born.
