Carey Mulligan: Actors Who Say Awards Don’t Matter Are ‘100 Percent Lying’

Christian Zilko
·2 min read
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As this year’s Oscar nominees enter the final stages of award season campaigning, they’re often forced to perform the delicate balancing act of hyping up their work while pretending not to care about winning. But Carey Mulligan, who recently picked up her third Oscar nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role for “Maestro,” isn’t interested in hiding her enthusiasm.

In a new interview with The Sunday Times, Mulligan made no secret of her excitement about her Oscar prospects.

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“It is just the coolest thing. Because it’s from your peers. It’s wicked,” Mulligan said of her nomination. She went on to cast doubt on actors who claim that they’re not excited by awards, saying they’re “100 percent lying.”

Mulligan also weighed in on another Oscar race, expressing disappointment that Greta Gerwig was left out of the Best Director category despite picking up nominations for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.

“I’m gutted for Greta because I don’t know what else you can do as a director to get nominated,” she said. “You make a critically acclaimed film that’s also an incredible global success, and yet you don’t get nominated?”

While Mulligan finds herself competing in a crowded Leading Actress field that includes Emma Stone in “Poor Things” and Lily Gladstone in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” her turn in “Maestro” was one of the most acclaimed performances of 2023.

“Nose aside, ‘Maestro’ is a technical triumph in terms of checking all the boxes of multihyphenate-ism — Cooper funnels himself into the project at every creative level — but this handsomely made Oscar-tailored package actually belongs to another person entirely, and that would be Carey Mulligan, playing Bernstein’s wife of nearly four decades, Felicia Montealegre,” IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio wrote in his review of the film. “She was both the adoring but also the suffering end of a lavender marriage in which she enabled Bernstein to have affairs with an endless train of men (including some of his proteges) as long as he was home on the weekends and didn’t let his sex life impact their three children. To play the sparky Costa Rica-born actress, Mulligan puts on a kind of Transatlantic accent and later a deep, worn-in inner graveliness by the end of her life, cut off by cancer in 1978. Mulligan is wonderful and never overwhelming or overstating in portraying a woman who never set aside her own ambitions for the sake of her husband — even while having to stand by in the wings of his greatness.”

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