Carey Mulligan has joined the long line of women dissatisfied with the cost of childcare available to working mothers. She described it as "so expensive" and said it was "incredibly difficult" being a mother working in film and TV.
The 33-year-old British actor, who has two young children with husband Marcus Mumford, said she'd never worked anywhere with on-set childcare and described film and TV environments as "limiting" for mothers.
"I don’t think being a working mother in our industry has been made that much easier. It’s incredibly difficult. Childcare is so expensive," she told the Radio Times. "I’ve never, ever been on a set where they have childcare, but I’ve been on lots of sets where lots of people have very young children … I had my daughter on the set of [the films] Mudbound and Wildlife and loads of the crew had kids, but they had to arrange childcare. It’s always incredibly complicated."
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If on-set childcare were available, Mulligan continued, "it would make it possible for a lot of talented people to come and do their job." She added: "At the moment, it's limiting."
Mulligan and Mumford's first child, Evelyn, was born in September 2015 and accompanied her on set of 2017 Oscar-nominated film Mudbound. Mulligan filmed this year's BBC Two drama Collateral while pregnant with the couple's second child, Wilfred (who was born in 2017), after programme writer Sir David Hare made her character pregnant in a rewrite, reported the BBC.
Mulligan also said the industry wasn't accepting enough of pregnant actors. "I don't think we're at the level where it's acceptable across the board yet. I think if people can hide it, they do," she told the magazine.
Mulligan joins Keira Knightley in her dissatisfaction with the state of childcare, and in her openness in sharing the difficulty of balancing parenting with an acting career. In an interview in 2016, the actor described UK childcare as "unbelievably expensive" and said she'd "become unbelievably aware" of how lucky she was "to be able to afford really good childcare" since becoming a parent.
"Because otherwise it would be at least four years out of my career," she added.
A report last month found that the rise in childcare costs in the UK is far outstripping wage rises. Childcare fees have soared by 52% over the past decade, compared with a 17% rise in earnings over that period, the Trades Union Congress found.