SBIFF Day Six Report: Carey Mulligan Mesmerizes, Artisans Shine, and More Films
Carey Mulligan Mesmerizes, Artisans Shine, and More Films
Carey Mulligan stars as "Cassandra" in director Emerald Fennell’s PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN, a Focus Features release. | Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features
It almost seems strange that Carey Mulligan is only 35, given the dizzying breadth of her screenography. From An Education to Drive to Inside Llewyn Davis to last year’s one-two punch of The Dig and A Promising Woman — the first as restrained as the latter is wild — she is well-known for deftly changing up and code-switching between varied roles. In fact, she summons up a few varied juicy characters in A Promising Woman, for which she has been taped for an Oscar nomination, which also brought her — if only virtually — to Santa Barbara for SBIFF’s Cinema Vanguard Award presentation/this-is-your-life sweepstakes on Monday afternoon.
We got a compacted overview of said breadth via a teaser preview roll of clips scrolled by to open Monday’s tribute event, moderated by Pete Hammond. The British actress calmly watched from an elegant hotel room in NYC (she’s there to host “Saturday Night Live” this week, her first acting gig in nearly a year and a half), then exclaimed, with her gentle half-smile, “having a montage like that set to Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’ is a career goal achieved. Check that one.”
This was not her first SBIFF rodeo, having appeared in the 805 in 2010, after the Oscar-buzzed An Education. She explained that her own education was mostly in the trenches, on the boards and film sets, skipping over drama school.
