Carey Mul­li­gan: ​‘I don’t have the guts to endure what these women did’

Carey Mul­li­gan has a knack for choos­ing peach roles and imbu­ing them with raw­ness as she moves through worlds full of peo­ple that would prey on her elfin form. Jen­ny in An Edu­ca­tion, Sis­sy in Shame and now Maud in Suf­fragette are char­ac­ters that bold­ly force them­selves onwards. LWLies met the British star and dis­cov­ered great descrip­tive waves of thought and feel­ing direct­ed towards the Suf­fragette move­ment, women’s rights and tak­ing a more active role in craft­ing inter­est­ing stories.

LWLies: You’ve pre­vi­ous­ly said that you only accept a role if you can’t bear the thought of some­one else play­ing it. What made you feel pos­ses­sive of Maud?

Mul­li­gan: It was a lot of things. It wasn’t just the char­ac­ter, it was the sto­ry. It was sur­pris­ing to me that this sto­ry hadn’t been told, even though it hap­pened 100 years ago; this mas­sive moment in women’s his­to­ry, and in civ­il rights in Britain, just hasn’t ever real­ly been put on screen. So it was the char­ac­ter, because she was unlike most char­ac­ters I’ve played before, and the sto­ry in gen­er­al, and then the cre­ative team that was behind it, who were an excit­ing bunch of peo­ple. But large­ly because I felt so sur­prised by so much of the stuff I read in the script and was excit­ed to put it on screen.

So it’s fair to say that, for once, the cause was more impor­tant to you than the character?

Yeah, I think I would have played any char­ac­ter in the film if that had been an oppor­tu­ni­ty because I was excit­ed about what the film was say­ing on a big­ger scale. But the char­ac­ter was excit­ing because of how she starts the sto­ry: she’s an intro­vert, she doesn’t have any friends, and she starts com­plete­ly polit­i­cal­ly apa­thet­ic, not inter­est­ed in the women’s move­ment and very tra­di­tion­al. She’s a very typ­i­cal Vic­to­ri­an work­ing class woman, she lives with­in the con­struct of her soci­ety and she’s very hap­py in that. She doesn’t want to explore the out­side world and then she goes through this rad­i­cal change. So I was equal­ly drawn to her. But it was all of the stuff that was in the film, the stuff that I just didn’t know about. I don’t know what we stud­ied in school, I guess it was a very sani­tised ver­sion of women’s his­to­ry and the Suf­frage move­ment. I didn’t know about hunger strik­ing, I didn’t real­ly know about police bru­tal­i­ty. I think I knew that there were women who chained them­selves to rail­ings, but real­ly to explore all of that stuff was exciting.

It’s kind of a car­i­ca­ture isn’t it, the Suf­fragette move­ment, in the pop­u­lar consciousness?

Yeah, you sort of have an image of women walk­ing through the streets with flow­ers and hav­ing tea and it’s all love­ly, and the real­i­ty was just so dif­fer­ent. I was so sur­prised. We live in this world where every five min­utes they make a film about the new sto­ry that hap­pened a day ago, or a week ago, and the minute some­thing either very bril­liant or very trag­ic hap­pens, there are sev­en peo­ple in Hol­ly­wood writ­ing scripts about it. Yet this sto­ry hap­pened and Emi­ly Wild­ing Davi­son died, and all of these amaz­ing moments in his­to­ry hap­pened and no one’s ever talked about it, really.

Did you at any point ever ask your­self if you had been around in 1912, would you have been a Suffragette?

Yeah, I have and I don’t know. It was very nor­mal to accept society’s con­ven­tions at that time. I won­der if I would have been because you think about the real­i­ty of what these women did, it was kind of crazy. Even, you know, going on a hunger strike and being force-fed, I mean that stuff is just unbear­able to think about. I can’t even imag­ine the will it must have tak­en for those women to endure that, but even women who went into art gal­leries and slashed famous works of art. I don’t know if I would have the guts to do that, that’s a ter­ri­fy­ing thing to do. Can you imag­ine going into the V&A today, walk­ing up to a paint­ing, get­ting a knife out, and slash­ing it? It’s a crazy act of brav­ery or reck­less­ness or what­ev­er you call it.

Arts and writ­ing and act­ing, it’s almost a safe space in which to be polit­i­cal, rather than actu­al street activism.

We’re able to tell the sto­ry about it, but they burned down church­es and blew up build­ings. The hunger strik­ing is extra­or­di­nary. We had a man come in to talk to us about the hunger strik­ing and the force-feed­ing. I think it was a sort of protest against Guan­tanamo or some­thing that he had gone through. He’d agreed to go on a hunger strike and be force-fed as part of a PSA or an exper­i­ment to basi­cal­ly show peo­ple what it was like to be force-fed and how bru­tal it was. He did it very clin­i­cal­ly with lots of med­ical input and before he did it, he had a cer­tain amount of vit­a­mins which none of these women had. They just stopped eat­ing. He went through all of this stuff and then he was force-fed. There is also a video of Mos Def doing it online. He did it as part of a cam­paign against force-feed­ing. You see that they get the tube about as far as to the top of his oesoph­a­gus, and he freaks out and they have to get it out and he can’t do it, and it’s unbe­liev­able. It’s hor­ri­ble to watch. And we’re talk­ing about mod­ern, 21^st cen­tu­ry med­ical tub­ing that they use now, which is all san­i­tary and as small as it can be. These women just had plas­tic, rub­ber pipes shoved down their noses – com­plete­ly unclean. It’s just bru­tal what they went through and the amount of peo­ple who did it. I think there was one Suf­fragette who was force-fed some­thing like 240 times. I just can’t ever imag­ine I would be strong enough to be able to endure that.

What do you think the equiv­a­lent for women today is of the right to vote?

Well, I mean, in a lot of places it’s still that.

What about in the West­ern world?

In the West­ern world where we live, I think pay equal­i­ty and inequal­i­ty in the work­force is our great­est dis­par­i­ty now. There’s also the com­par­a­tive lack of women who are in pow­er­ful posi­tions – the num­ber of women in gov­ern­ment and the num­ber of female MPs that we have. Some­body asked me if I thought it would be a bet­ter world if it was run by women and I don’t. I think it would be a bet­ter world if it was run equal­ly by men and women. We’re still such a long way away from that. In our very priv­i­leged soci­ety, where we have come an awful long way, we’re still look­ing at a mas­sive gap between the way men and women are treat­ed in the workplace.

On the note of being run by women, it sounds like the Suf­fragette set was run by women.

It was! It was a bet­ter place. Yeah, it was over­whelm­ing­ly run by women, which was great for us. The rehearsal peri­od before shoot­ing was one of the best expe­ri­ences I had pre-mak­ing a film. We had three weeks of spend­ing time with peo­ple who real­ly want­ed to learn, because a lot of us had no real clue. Faye [Ward, pro­duc­er], Sarah [Gavron, direc­tor] and Abi [Mor­gan, writer] knew a lot because they had worked on this for years, but a lot of us came to it not hav­ing a mas­sive under­stand­ing of the real­i­ty of what the women went through. They had a table in the rehearsal room and had, like, 50 books and a mil­lion pho­to­copies of diaries and all that sort of stuff. We were sent off on lit­tle expe­di­tions. Anne Marie [Duff] and I went to a laun­dry and I went to the Lon­don Muse­um. We were con­stant­ly research­ing and work­ing then com­ing back togeth­er and say­ing, ​‘I found this, and it’s so cool and we should put it in the film.’ I nev­er had an expe­ri­ence like that.

You often play char­ac­ters whose feel­ings and impuls­es lead them into harm’s way. Is there a way to live a true and pas­sion­ate life while also stay­ing safe?

I don’t know. I think its part of human nature to make mis­takes and to stum­ble into the wrong things and I don’t sup­pose you can avoid that. There was a great quote that Emme­line Pankhurst said about life and mak­ing a stand for some­thing and it was some­thing like, ​‘What is life? At best it’s very short. Wouldn’t it be bet­ter to have left this life hav­ing struck a blow for what is a truer life?’ If your aim is to do some­thing for a truer life, a bet­ter life, you have to accept the con­se­quences as long as you’re not hurt­ing oth­er peo­ple. I think that was ulti­mate­ly what the Suf­fragette move­ment want­ed, whether you believe in the mil­i­tant move­ment or not, these were women who were try­ing to strike a blow with­out hurt­ing oth­er peo­ple, only risk­ing their own lives to make the world a bet­ter place for them, for their chil­dren and for the gen­er­a­tions ahead of them.

With­in your voca­tion, a way to strike a blow is to take more con­trol and make your own projects. Is this some­thing you are inter­est­ed in?

I mean I think it is, to a degree, I feel much more excit­ed about that, hav­ing worked with Faye and Sarah than I did before. I’ve tak­en big peri­ods of time off work and been wait­ing for these great roles to come along, and they have come along but before I did Far From the Madding Crowd, I had 18 months of just wait­ing for the right thing. With Suf­fragette, I thought, ​‘Okay, I should prob­a­bly try and gen­er­ate some­thing myself as opposed to just sit­ting and wait­ing for the right part to fall into my lap’, because it doesn’t very often. I don’t have the added advan­tage of being in a Mar­vel com­ic book film. I’m not going to be offered every­thing under the sun, so I think it is a bit more about try­ing to make inter­est­ing sto­ries about things you want to talk about.

Any plans to direct?

I have a sort of ​‘in 20 years time’ idea of direct­ing, but I don’t know. I’m still fig­ur­ing out act­ing and still feel­ing like I’m try­ing to get bet­ter on every job, so no, I don’t have any plans to direct, real­ly. I’ve been very for­tu­nate in that I get to be involved ear­li­er in the process now in films, so I came on this film pret­ty ear­ly on and so there­fore got to see the cast form around me and be involved in con­ver­sa­tions about that. And Meryl was my idea. Well, she was actu­al­ly my mum’s idea. That was so extra­or­di­nary. It was asked who should play Emme­line Pankhurst. We want­ed the most icon­ic, best actress. Some­one who would inspire and who women loved and my mum said, ​‘You should ask Meryl Streep’. I was like, ​‘Ha, yeah’. Then I told Sarah, ​‘We should ask Meryl Streep’, and she was like, ​‘Ha, yeah’. Then Meryl Streep said yes. To be involved from that lev­el is so excit­ing. Just to see it and be around and be in script meet­ings. But I’m still a way away from the lev­el that I would feel com­fort­able enough to do what Sarah did. I mean, the work­load! She spent the last six years get­ting the film made. It’s a huge com­mit­ment and takes an enor­mous amount of emo­tion­al intel­li­gence to coor­di­nate. And her pas­sion behind it. She’s done extra­or­di­nar­i­ly well. I don’t know if I’m quite there yet, I feel like I’ve got to focus on my lit­tle thing first.