Carey Mulligan Reveals How Returning to Work Helped Her After Postpartum Depression

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Carey Mulligan is opening up about her experience with postpartum depression.

Speaking with Vanity Fair about her upcoming film She Said, — where the actress portrays New York Times reporter Megan Twohey — Mulligan talked about handling the journalist's relationship with postpartum depression on screen.

In the conversation, Twohey applauded how carefully Mulligan, 37, approached portraying such a very personal struggle in the film.

"I felt like she really spent a lot of time with me, and studied me and my family in a way in which she was able to not just portray a sense of me, but to portray this really personal and even difficult time in my life, in a very accurate and respectful way," she said.

Mulligan then told the outlet she was also able to draw experience from her own postpartum struggles, after welcoming daughter Evelyn Grace in 2015. Like Twohey, she found going back to work — in Mulligan's case, on the upcoming film Suffragette — helped her heal.

"It was either cancel the whole thing or just get on and do it," the actress recalled.

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"And that — and a combination of lots of other things, and help and support from everyone around me — was my light," Mulligan added. "So, Megan and I talked about that, and we both shared what we had both been through, like so many women have been through."

Zoe Kazan — who stars in She Said as Jodi Kantor, who worked with Twohey to break the Weinstein sexual-harassment story back in 2017, sparking the larger #MeToo movement — said she also identified with her character as a working mom.

Kazan's partner Paul Dano was filming Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans while the actress was working on She Said. At the same time, the couple's preschool-age daughter was starting on her own adventure.

"Our daughter was starting preschool and her two parents were stretched across the country and each working 17-hour days," Kazan explained to Vanity Fair. "And I really felt this throughline between me and Jodi of all the ways that are sort of invisible when you show up to work, that make it possible for you to show up to work."

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In addition to daughter Evelyn, Mulligan shares son Wilfred, 5, with husband Marcus Mumford. During a chat with PORTER magazine in 2020, the Promising Young Woman actress talked about not missing her life before welcoming her two children.

"In fact, every time we stepped into a new bar set, [director/producer/writer Emerald Fennell] and I would both be like, 'God, we haven't been in a bar in a really long time.' And I'm very glad of that," Mulligan said at the time.

The mother of two also shared with PORTER that as she gets older, "My female friendships have become increasingly important — particularly the ones with friends I made when I was 14 at school."

"It's something about doing stages of life together and supporting each other," Mulligan explained. "Every year, we do our birthdays together, because all our birthdays are within six days of one another. It's great."