Carey Mulligan

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0:48That's why over 200 ,000 happy customers have made the switch. Upgrade your space today. Visit washablesofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. You're listening to Ruthie's Table 4 in partnership with Montclair. Ask Ralph Fiennes about Carey Mulligan, and he will tell you she's a brilliant actor and was a uniquely brilliant partner in their movie The Dig. Ask Lorne Michaels about her hosting Saturday Night Live, and he will say she was one of the best in almost 50 years. Ask David Hare, the writer, and Robert Fox, the producer, of their play Starlight, and they will talk about her killer ambition for authenticity and excellence and her kindness to everyone involved.

1:42Today, 24 hours after being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in the movie Maestro, she is here in the River Cafe kitchen cooking scallops and sage with River Cafe executive chef Sean Owen. And I know that when this morning is over and all of you ask me about Carrie Mulligan, absolutely and for sure, the answer will be, I love her. That's so nice. So, Carrie, you just were cooking a recipe which I would love you to read for scallops and then we'll talk about everything. Eight medium scallops Olive oil Sea salt and freshly ground pepper One tablespoon salted capers Prepared Half a bunch of sage leaves Stalks removed One lemon Brush a frying pan with a little oil And place over a high heat When smoking, add the scallops Season with a little salt and pepper And cook for two minutes on one side Turn the scallops over And immediately add the capers and sage leaves plus a little extra olive oil so the sage leaves fry.

2:53Cook for a further two minutes, shaking the pan constantly. Squeeze the juice of the lemon and serve. Get the pan really hot and put the scallops around the edge and sear them. And then let's really check in a tiny minute more. I was trying to think about scallops and thinking about what's delicious about scallops. Is it a texture or is it because it's a very delicate sweet? I think it's the sweetness because I'm funny with texture. Some things, I'm kind of, yeah, I think it's the sweetness of them. Yeah. And usually a pretty good sauce, right? Yes, exactly. Something that's with it. Exactly. So how long is this then?

3:37I reckon two or three minutes on each side. And then that's it? Yeah. Yeah. And then squeeze a bit of lemon in now. good old generous amounts of olive oil isn't there yeah i love that though well we're on pints of it here yeah but it's very good yeah yeah delicious something like that easy easy i mean relatively it's about getting the right amount of color on yeah and letting them sit and then um you know you can put instead of lemon juice you can put vinegar yeah instead of capers you can put anchovies instead of um sage you can put basil that's delicious cool oh so good thank you so much so having cooked it yeah what was that like oh it's so um well it's one of those things that i i would have i'd love to do at home but i feel like you need to do it when people are already there because you want to give it you know to people straight away i wouldn't have the confidence to do that but i think i would have a go at it now Good.

4:35I think it's about having really good scallops. And I always love when you actually are in a kitchen, you see how much olive oil goes and everything. A little bit of olive oil is actually a lot of olive oil. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, we use it. And so when you say that you would like to do it for dinner, people coming to dinner, but then there is that separation, isn't there, where you're cooking and they're there. Do you like to cook around people or do you like to have everything? our house we have um we it's like a farmhouse kitchen so we have a big we don't have like a cooking aisle or a separate it's sort of a one big room so we have a big table it was an old chemistry lab table and that's in the middle of the room and then so everything kind of you cook around people my husband is more he does it more than like he does all the big event cooking like Christmases and you know Sunday roasts and things like that I'll do if we've got you know 10 people I'll do like a big stew or a big casserole or something like that.

5:35But he's good at knocking stuff up. Like we have barely anything in the fridge and he can make something out of that. Whereas I need a very clear recipe. Order, yeah. You have cooked on stage. Was it that your theatre was Starlight? No, it was West End. What was it? First in West End. Yeah, it was first in the West End, yeah. David was telling me this morning about cooking spaghetti bolognese on stage, and he was saying that Stephen Daldry, being Stephen Daldry, insisted on having a chef come from somewhere who was one of the great chefs to tell me about cooking on stage. Was it the first time you'd ever had to cook on stage?

6:16Yeah. I think it was the only time I've had to eat on stage. Or eating on stage, really. Yeah, because I would cook it in the first half, and I would eat it in the second half. What was it like? It was very basic, but there was a musicality to the way so much of, it was cooking it was one thing, but also fitting it in because she's cooking in what turns into an enormous row. And so much of the physicality of the cooking was in the sort of smashing of garlic and chopping. So I had to be cooking, but also furious, but also controlled that I didn't cut my finger off whilst I was furious. And there was a lot of kind of comedy to, you know, the way that Bill would come over and sort of glance and judge at the way that it was being cooked.

7:07And, you know, putting the oil in first or not putting the oil in, that was one of the little gags. But, yeah, and the theatre would fill with the smell of cooking. So I used to say to anyone who was coming to see it, particularly my dad, you have to eat before you come. Because if you come and you watch a play that's like two and a half, three hours long, you know, and you're hungry, you're going to hate it. And that's so unfair of us. And was it for real or was it mostly theater? I think it was totally edible. I mean, it probably wasn't great, but it was, you know, I ate it and it tasted fine to me.

7:42And what about eating on stage? When I did it in New York, I was pregnant. And I did go through a phase of feeling incredibly unwell and nothing was good to eat. So for a while, I was taking very small nibbles in the second half. But no, generally, I kind of loved it. And in film, there are also scenes of you eating in Drive, in the diner, and not eating. And so most recently in Maestro, which I saw at the opening night, and you were a phenomenal, great movie, and very compelling. You know, I grew up with the Bernsteins. I didn't know them, but I mean as major figures in our lives, not just West Side Story and his concerts, but their involvement in social politics, for which they were hugely maligned, which was unfair by Tom Wolfe for the radical chic.

8:36And especially your character, Felicia, was really involved in the civil rights struggle, in the Vietnam War. and as a character I thought that it wasn't really that much in the film, but she was a formidable woman. She was, and it was at one point a whole radical chic scene. Oh, there was? Yeah, yeah. But I think, you know, the script evolved over five years. Yeah, sure, sure. But yeah, and she was. And actually when I went to Chile and I met her family there and they talked about, you know, she was active from a young age, from when she was a teenager in Santiago. She was very active in sexual justice.

9:21I wonder whether he was there then in Chile. Would that have been before? I think before, yeah. But she was very, but she was a real homemaker. You know, she didn't cook, I don't think. I think she had Julia Vega. She had people in her life that were, but she, everything was, they called her the dining room at the apartment of the Dakota, the French restaurant, because every time anyone came, it was beautifully kind of table, the tablescape was unbelievable, the flowers that were brought in. And I think every kind of environment where she was a host was very kind of beautifully put on. And she talks about being responsible for the kitchen of life and that everything was, you know, it was ordering the best produce and ordering the best flowers and ordering, you know, that was a big part of her life, particularly in New York.

10:15Also upstate, I think, but in New York that was a big part of her. She loved fostering this kind of beautiful environment. What was the filming like? What was the experience of doing that movie? It was amazing. I mean, it was the closest, I think, to a part that I had played. I always sort of felt like I had played Nina and the Seagull and, you know, Kira and Skylight and doing this monologue, Girls and Boys, I had these kind of epic roles on stage. And I felt when I read Felicia that she had that breadth, that she had that kind of, you know, it felt like a kind of Chekhov role. It felt like she's got this huge journey and she starts.

11:03And she's actually not dissimilar to Nina in some ways because she does start as this actress with this burning ambition and is disillusioned and, you know, driven to, you know, to, well, in my opinion, not madness, but driven to a completely different place by the end of the story and having become a completely different person. And I feel like Felicia really has that huge, you know, she came to New York, you know, bright as a button and full of hope and ambition. And you really do get a sense of her being worn down by her experience. So just the character on its own was amazing. The way that Bradley works is so unique and so...

11:51And I loved it. A completely different experience. Nothing like I'd ever done before. Completely, you know, and I think because he's in it as well. But, you know, the most amazing set where you don't feel like you're in a film set. You feel like you're walking on stage. And that was right up my alley. Where did you film? We shot in Tanglewood for the first week, which was amazing. Then we shot in New York, and then we were on a soundstage in Brooklyn for a minute, and then we had a break, and then we shot in Ely Cathedral, and we shot in a soundstage in London as well. And in terms of, again, about eating and food and nourishment, this is a character who wastes away, who starts disappearing.

12:40And the way you conveyed her fragility and his emotions dealing with her husband's effect, well, dealing with the effect on the family. and so to see this strong woman in the beginning that you played and then how was that for you when having to show someone dying, you know, of a terrible disease? Yeah, it was, I think, you know, we shot her younger stuff right at the beginning of the shoot and we jumped straight to a scene after she's diagnosed with cancer and it was the first time I think I played anyone over a span of so many years So she was the first week, it was sort of a younger wig and black and white.

13:26And then the following Monday, I had prosthetics on. And I think I was surprised, actually, I thought that there would be a lot more, I'd have to like map it a lot more. But it was interesting once I was in the prosthetics in the costume of that point in her life. It's funny what it does looking at yourself in the mirror when you, you know, we did the makeup for when she's right at the end of her life. It took about four and a half hours and was prosthetics and lots of painting in and these incredible contact lenses that took out the sort of white around my eyes. And when I had the headscarf on and, you know, you look in the mirror and you do feel different.

14:07It is an odd thing to look at. Also, because we weren't trying to make her look. I wasn't trying to look like Felicia because Felicia isn't a well-known face in the way that Bradley needed to look like Lenny. we I just looked like myself and so you know I remember saying to Duncan who was doing my prosthetics and Sian Grigg makeup artist I said is this basically a time machine like yeah you know without the illness before the illness is this essentially you know and I do look exactly like my mom yeah in the in the palm court you know I look exactly like my mom does um and so it was a kind of interesting yeah the whole thing was very interesting but the when it came to the sick stuff it was a lot of it was based on Bradley's experience of his father um who had cancer and passed away with cancer so and I knew that um you know some of the detail that had been written in folding up the napkins um was something that Bradley's dad did um and lots of it was so lots of I felt constantly aware of him and and then also when people would see me in the makeup and And I think, you know, if you've had anyone in your life who's been through an illness that has affected them like that physically and visibly, you know, I remember an AD sort of like bursting into tears because she just sort of, it reminded her too much of someone that she loved.

15:28And so I felt just really determined to not, to get it right, but also that if there was something about the sort of general sense of everybody, by that point, we just had the most incredible crew. they were so amazing it really felt like that didn't when you walked on set it wasn't like this actor has this hard thing to do it was like oh this person's not well yeah and that was an incredible kind of feeling and that's how the set felt that whole week when we shot Did you eat? No You didn't eat? What was that like? I mean I ate at home and I ate but when I was at work no no I just didn't yeah because there was you know and I remember the the way that she I remember Mark Bridges our costume designer of brought this little shawl that goes over her shoulders when she's receiving visitors and it's so it was my grandmother my grandmother had dementia she didn't but she did lose lots of weight and she did get you know as she was unable to feed herself you know she it was you know was constantly trying to get her to intake nutrition but I remember the way her shoulders kind of came forward and it was so highlighted by this shawl that was over her and so when he brought that shawl, that sense of fragility and it was just so, it just, I felt it, you know, just it was so kind of eerie how you know, that physicality is just so familiar.

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19:18Shop now at washablesofas.com. Add a little to your life. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. Growing up, you grew up in a hotel, is that right? Yeah, we lived in hotels until I was almost eight. My father was a hotel manager for Intercontinental for my whole childhood until I was sort of 18. So I was born, I think we were at the Britannia when I was born. My dad was running the Britannia Hotel in London. And then the Mayfair. Second Governors Square. Yeah. Yeah. So there and then the Mayfair. And then we moved to Germany to Hanover and Dusseldorf. And he ran hotels there.

20:04and then we moved back to London he ran I can't remember the name of the hotel then he was at the Churchill in Portman Square so he moved around those and he also ran hotels in Vienna and Frankfurt but you actually lived in the hotel we lived in the hotel till I was 8 well you were a bit like Eloise do you remember that book Eloise? did you ever know that? growing up in the plaza would you run around the hotels and sort of find what was that like living in a hotel? it was amazing it was kind of all we knew but I look back and I think oh wow that was kind of an extraordinary way to grow up. And my brother and I were certainly, you know, we would sort of roll around with the maids, you know, going into people's rooms after they checked out and sort of, you know.

20:49I remember sort of sitting in the basket with all the sheets, you know, with my hands holding on, rolling around the corridor and, you know, sitting on with my whole body wrapped around a hoover, you know, going up and down the hallways. Were you ordering room service or did you have a proper apartment? No, it was like they'll have a little, I mean, the hotels that we lived in, sort of an apartment in the top floor for the manager. So we lived in a, yeah, mum talks about, we had our own little mini kitchen and stuff, but it was more, yeah, we didn't do room service, but we did have our linen changed, I'm pretty sure.

21:27So mum always says that was a massive bonus. I must have been living on the job and being the manager and living there. Yeah. It must have been, I mean, great for the hotel to have the manager there. Yeah. Are you one of many? No, just me and my brother. Yeah. But we were bilingual because we moved to Germany when I was three and we went to, you know, we learned German. I went to a German kindergarten, Rudolf Steiner kindergarten, and then I went to school in Hanover. We were with a lot of ex, you know, with military kids. And then we were in Dusseldorf at international school. And then we moved home.

22:01So we were there. We was, the only thing I remember about the kitchen, because we were, you know, no one near the kitchen. That was not. And I was saying earlier, my dad, you know, I think briefly worked in kitchens on his way. He worked his way up from kind of collecting glasses in a restaurant to being the manager. Yeah. and he so whenever he cooks generally I exit the building because it's just not what is it like he just likes things ordered and the way that they and you know for us to sort of come in and sort of casually start munching on something he's always not not part of it so that yes it's but I my my memory of one of my birthday parties when I was little was at the hotel in Dusseldorf and you know the the pastry chef made a bunch of dough and we were all making little dollies out of dough and then they took them off and cooked them in the kitchen and brought them back and um and the birthday cakes you know when we lived in hotels were always you know those very elaborate kind of I feel like they always had liquor in them they always had like a bit of booze yes it wasn't what like properly kiddy birthday cakes and they had like very beautiful writing and icing and all that kind of stuff.

23:20There was always such a sense of occasion in hotels. It's always like there's a big display for Christmas or there's a big, you know, it was like there was always this sort of sense of there's a sort of event happening. But I always felt really, I like being nomadic. I don't mind, you know, I like being in hotels. I'm not someone who I don't need to bring, you know, some people sort of need to bring stuff with them to make wherever they are feel like home. Tracy Allen carries with her. But you know, the only time I ate lunch here was with Tracy. Oh, was it? Yeah, with Tracy and Mabel. She described, you know, that she, I don't think she's ever ordered room service.

23:56She would always, you know, go out and find something and take her food on the plane or take an object. And as you say, I love hotels so much that I actually don't like when I'm upgraded to a suite because it reminds me too much of home. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like the confines of a hotel room. You can find everything. You know where your book is. you know where everything is. I always thought that maybe I'd be one of those women who age, you know, Richard now being a state claridge's for the rest of our days. I said to him, if we sold our house, how many nights do you think we'd get in claridge's?

24:29It was like probably six. And do you think there was a performance that you had to behave in a certain way with strangers? I think so, yeah. We met people who were staying at the hotel sometimes and there was a real kind of, It did, it felt like being a bit of a diplomat's daughter or something, that someone would come and stay at the hotel and you would greet them. Did that prepare you, do you think, for acting in a certain way? I think, yeah, perhaps. I think also moving around, constantly kind of being the new kid and meeting. So by the time I was eight, we'd moved. I'd been at, I think, three places in Germany, three or four schools.

25:13No, three, so nursery and then two schools and then home to a convent school in Buckinghamshire. And then when I was 11, I moved again. And then when I was 13, I moved again. So we were, so I think I was always kind of used to being new and having to introduce myself, adapt to people and, you know, that sort of thing. What was German food like? Do you have a memory of it? Or did you? Yeah, lots of quite meat, meat based food. I mean, we were amongst kind of lots of Brits as well. But we were amazingly lucky. We got to go skiing in Austria in our holidays and things. We had lots of Käse-Spetzel and Wiener-Schnitzel and delicious like warm, brothy things to be able to warm up.

26:05But yeah, I think because it was also an international hotel It was, you know, it wasn't, we were, if I was eating stuff from, it wasn't necessarily German cuisine or anything. I usually ask people about their families and growing up and restaurants, you know, were restaurants. But in your case, I often ask if restaurants were a special occasion, which was the truth in my family. We went out to restaurants for somebody's birthday and somebody's anniversary or something great had happened. And you'd celebrate a restaurant here. we see people just coming out for dinner with their kids all the time.

26:39And maybe it was just more for you that. Was that something that was just part of your life? I suppose so. I don't really remember going to restaurants at all. I don't remember going to nice, you know, white tablecloth restaurants ever with my... We would go to, there was a pizza place in Dusseldorf that we would go to, but like really a hole-in-the-wall kind of pizza place, and that was sort of a treat that we would go there. I don't think we went to, I remember for the millennium, my dad was running the intercontinental in Vienna and there was a big millennium meal there and I was 14 and 14, 15, I think.

27:16Yeah, 14. And my best friend came with me and we bought dresses, you know, for millennium and we sat and it was a proper white tablecloth, seven course meal thing. And that was very, that was a big, big deal. So I don't think we did necessarily. Although when we moved home and we were living in Buckinghamshire, we used to go, if there was anything to celebrate, we'd go to Mr. Poon's, the Chinese restaurant, and go and have Big Chinese. And we did that kind of for years. Did your parents cook for you? Yeah. I mean, mum's always, you know, she can turn her hand to anything. She was never a sort of passionate cook.

27:55I think because dad was the cook, really. So if there was meals that were cooked, it would be dad, you know, and mum. My grandmother was a wonderful baker. Yeah, loved baking, yeah. So where did she live? So she was, my mother's Welsh, so she was in Carmarthenshire. And every time I went to her for any kind of length of time, we would just bake and bake and bake. What would you make? Oh, well, everything. Welsh cakes, famously. Delicious Welsh cakes. What are Welsh cakes? Don't tell Sean I asked you this because I've lived in this country for 40 years. Well, you wouldn't necessarily have them if you weren't.

28:33But they're like, they're little mini sort of flat cake with raisins in. Like a scone? Yeah, like a sort of flatter scone. But she'd make amazing Welsh cakes. A cherry almond cake, a delicious cherry almond cake that just got better the longer you left it in the tin. You know, it was that kind of thing. I know that from going from school, you knew that acting was going to be an essential part of your life. Can you tell me how that happened? It was all I wanted to do from a young age, but I didn't think of it really as a career until I was probably 12, you know, maybe. I wanted to do musical theatre.

29:19That was the big, you know, that's my mum and I went to go and see every musical. Every time we could go into London, we'd go and see musical. We went to New York together, just the two of us, and went and saw Cabaret. We saw the original, the Sam Mendes production at Studio 54. We saw that. I told this to him the other day, but I saw Kevin Bacon in a one-man show at the Walter Kerr Theatre, or I forget the name of it. But I then later, years later, went and did The Seagull at the Walter Kerr, and it was a really crazy kind of full circle thing. So I was sort of wanting to do musical theatre, then was slowly sort of realising that that was quite a big job in terms of dance and song and I wasn't a dancer and I kind of was a choir singer but not a singer-singer.

30:05Was not enormously interested in film so much. I mean, I loved movies. I loved, you know, all of my favourite films. Which ones were they? Like Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. And, you know, I liked sort of Spielberg, like proper movies. and then I slowly realised that it was more kind of theatre that I was probably just straight theatre, just doing plays. So it was when I auditioned for a bunch of drama schools basically and didn't get into any of them but that was my first sort of big sort of attempt to do to kind of make it a job which didn't get very well but then I found another kind of way in luckily.