We've all worried that we weren't doing our best at work, but Carey Mulligan's questionable job performance just so happened to play in theaters across the world. In a new interview, Mulligan lamented her performance in The Great Gatsby, even wishing she could give it another try.
“I didn’t love my work in Gatsby,” Mulligan told Variety. “I’m not sure if I slight kind of lost my way because I was intimidated by the scale of it. I think I might have been overawed by my experience and intimidated by the level of performances around me.”
Who can really blame Mulligan for being intimidated knowing that she was playing Daisy Buchanan to Leonardo DiCaprio's Jay Gatsby in the 2013 Baz Luhrmann-directed remake. After all, no one has ever accused Luhrmann of skimping on the glitz, glamour, and over-the-top effects.
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Mulligan compared the hullabaloo surrounding the casting of The Great Gatsby to an "America’s Got Talent casting" and said she never really found her footing. “It was how big it was and how visual it was," Mulligan said. "I definitely felt there were fleeting moments where I really found the character and then I felt like I lost her a little bit. I’ve never been wholly thrilled about my work in it.”
To be honest, on a whole, no one received rave reviews for the movie; it only has a 48% on Rotten Tomatoes. But, what upsets Mulligan most about her performance is that she knows she could do better. “I love the character so much and I spent so much time preparing,” she said. “It might not have translated onto the screen. I think I let my own security get in my own way. In that respect, I wish I could do it again.”
While that's unlikely, being that Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby was a remake of the 1974 film starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, Mulligan did say the experience of working on the blockbuster changed the way she picks her films. “Maybe it made me a little more independent-film centric to try to find something more containable,” Mulligan says. This includes her latest film, Mudbound, directed by Dee Rees, which focuses on race and poverty in the 1940s Mississippi Delta.
What Mulligan never says in this interview is that The Great Gatsby turned her off to working with DiCaprio again, which means, there's still a chance we could see a reunion of these stars. Hopefully, in something Mulligan actually likes her performance in.
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