Actress Carey Mulligan opens up to The Daily Beast’s Lorenza Munoz about her turn in director Steve McQueen’s “Shame” opposite Michael Fassbender and how playing “Nina” in Chekhov’s “The Seagull” helped her prepare for the role:
“For a couple of years after playing Nina in Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull, Mulligan did not feel moved by the scripts she was sent. She was searching to reconnect with Nina, the aspiring and vulnerable actress in the classic play about art, love, and death. Mulligan says she found a contemporary version of Nina in Sissy. Like Nina, Sissy is desperate to make a human connection and find feeling in her life. And perhaps like Nina, she will endure.
“There was nothing like the feeling of playing Nina on the stage,” she said. “I felt like Sissy and Nina were related.”
And so she tracked down McQueen and practically forced him to hire her when they met in a hotel lobby in central London.
“I wanted to leave, and she wanted me to stay,” he said, admitting that Mulligan seemed “an odd choice” for the part. “She wanted the role quite desperately, and it reminded me of Sissy, so I offered her the role on the spot.”
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The Cineaste's Lament. 