A Touch of Audrey

Sony Pictures Classics As the breakout star of An Education, Carey Mulligan is being compared to a young Hepburn. She talks to Rachel Syme about older men and playing Gordon Gekko’s daughter in Wall Street 2.

An Education is a rare kind of film; a quiet coming-of-age story about a fiercely intelligent teenage girl living in barely pre-Beatles London. The world is stagnant for a brief moment before exploding, and in that time, 16-year-old Jenny is languishing and bored. She smokes Parisian cigarettes and spouts odd phrases in French; she totes around Camus and brags to her giggly girlfriends about how worldly and literary she will become when she enters university (Oxford is, of course, Jenny’s—and her father’s—chosen goal). She does what trapped teenage girls have done for generations; she plays foreign records and belts them aloud in her bedroom, she busies herself with meaningless flirtations with cherubic schoolboys, and she shoots her hand up for every question in the classroom.

And then, along comes the only force that could throw Jenny off track; a cultured older man, thirtysomething and handsomely pockmarked. David (Peter Sarsgaard) is a music-loving, Jewish art thief who goes to cabaret clubs and dog races, and from the minute she hops into his red sports car, Jenny is no longer bored but electrified. She ditches her plaid knee-highs for Audrey Hepburn-style shift dresses, fur stoles, red lipstick and a bouffant. She could almost pass for a woman—but as we all know, no 16-year-old girl can transform so quickly; trips to Paris, symphony concerts, and new jewels cannot substitute real maturity. As Jenny later confesses to a teacher after David is only a memory, “I feel old, but not so wise.”

It is hard not to fall a little bit in love at first sight with the 24-year-old British actress. When we meet in a Park Avenue hotel, her brown hair is snipped so boyishly short and she is drowning in one of those long black “grandfather” cardigans that fall below the knees. She is texting emphatically with her best girl friend, Moff, who is staying with her in New York for a bit and is “off getting a manicure.” Mulligan curtsies and swoons a bit as she says the last word, as if it’s all very fancy. She is a true coquette; she wears winged eyeliner and bats her eyes as she shifts between various curled-up positions on the couch—it’s charming behavior, given that the world is currently flirting back. Apart from promoting An Education, Mulligan is in town to shoot Wall Street 2 with her boyfriend Shia LeBoeuf, Michael Douglas, and director Oliver Stone, who called her on her cell phone to offer her the part. She’s having her first big wave of attention, and it’s only natural that she knows it.

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“It’s obviously very strange, a little mad,” she says of the sudden media attention. “Especially the Hepburn comparisons. I mean, that’s such a lovely thing to say about the film, and I see it in the Paris montage. But you know, I didn’t think about the end product much when I was making it. I just thought, what fun! There’s Emma Thompson! I had to fight for this part; I auditioned three times and must have called my agent every day for two months afterwards. I knew it was a special gang going in, but I just thought…oh, I have to play Jenny. Her journey is enormous.”

Mulligan says that she knew that the only way to make Jenny’s arc believable was to be convinced herself to take the risks that the character does. “Jenny first meets David on the street and gets into his car,” she says. “Modern sensibility tells you that’s a really stupid idea, so we wanted to make it realistic. Peter had to really convince me to get in. I was standing in the rain, with gallons of water on me, and this soaking cello, and he drives up and says he is nervous about my instrument. He seems like this safe person. And in 1962, it was a safer world. So she gets in.”

Mulligan notes that this attitude would not have been her natural inclination: “I worked in a pub when I was 18, and this guy used to come in. He had a red Ferrari. I remember once he wrote, “dinner?” on a check. I thought, really? You’ve got a cool car, but come on. But Jenny is more bold than I am. I didn’t have a boyfriend until I was 19. She was so bored, and it was just this whole time in history. Her family doesn’t understand her at all, at school she feels like she is learning things to appease other people, and then a guy in a red car comes along, and bang! She wants to do that.”