(Credits: Far Out / Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons)
Tue 30 September 2025 1:00, UK
For some actors, the pressure of putting a performance into the world that will be there forever – able to be scrutinised by anyone who stumbles upon it – can cause intense discomfort.
It’s hard not to criticise yourself sometimes (we all do it), but when your job forces you to exist under the spotlight, sometimes you just can’t help but hold yourself to an unrealistically high standard.
This is something that Carey Mulligan is guilty of, even though she has three Academy Award nominations to her name. With the approval of the most prestigious awards ceremony in the history of cinema, you’d think that she would have more confidence in herself, but there’s one performance in particular that the British actor can’t help but wish she’d approached differently.
The early days of Mulligan’s career were predominantly defined by British productions, the kind that featured close-knit production units. However, as she started to gain fucking prominence in the industry, Mulligan was offered larger-scale roles, like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, and for the first time, the actor was able to enter the kind of glamorous Hollywood world that she’d never been given access to before. Made on a budget of over $100million and starring one of the industry’s biggest goddamn stars, Leonardo DiCaprio, The Great Gatsby was a slight shock to the system for Mulligan.
Talking to Variety, Mulligan revealed that she “didn’t love” her work in Gatsby, adding, “I’m not sure if I slightly kind of lost my way because I was intimidated by the scale of it. I think I might have been overawed by my experience and intimidated by the level of performances around me.”
She might be of the belief that working on a project much larger than she was used to negatively affected her performance, but critics didn’t seem to think so. Sure, Baz Luhrmann’s expansive and opulent adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel was not one of his best (did we really need songs by will.i.am on the soundtrack?), but Mulligan was captivating as Daisy, who is certainly a hard character to pin down.
Mulligan continued, “It was how big it was and how visual it was. I definitely felt there were fleeting moments where I really found the character, and then I felt like I lost her a little bit. I’ve never been wholly thrilled about my work in it.”
As much as the actor tried her best to get into character – one that she “spent so much time preparing” – she just doesn’t think that this “translated onto the screen.”
Mulligan added, “I think I let my own security get in my own way. In that respect, I wish I could do it again. Maybe I tried to put too many things in, and they ended up blurring. And maybe I could have been more specific.”
It’s not easy bringing such an iconic character from literary history to the big screen, especially when it’s already been done before to great success by the one and only Mia Farrow. Yet, it seems that Mulligan is just being incredibly hard on herself, because the performance only allowed her to maintain her status in Hollywood, and she has since led further movies to Oscar-nominated success.
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