Carey Mulligan Will Do Anything for the Right Film (Interview)

Two things can be true at the same time: Like that doing press for James Griffiths’ “The Ballad of Wallis Island” has proven to be the “easiest thing” for star Carey Mulligan and that she might also have gotten a little close to crashing her car while doing exactly that. In the spirit of multitasking, Mulligan conducted her most recent interview with IndieWire while driving. (She did not crash. She did, however, speak quite effusively about a filmmaking process that does indeed sound pretty lovely.)

“Oh, I love the boys so much and I am so, sorry, I’m driving, so I’m trying not to crash,” Mulligan said. “They’re just my favorites, my favorite people, so I’m like, ‘Yes, let’s fucking do it. Let’s do it. Let’s go for it.’ It’s been so fun. It’s the easiest thing to do press for.”

“The boys” in question are director Griffiths, plus co-writers and co-stars Tim Key and Tom Basden. The long-time collaborators have spent nearly two decades with this material, initially conceiving of it as short film “The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island,” which won best short at The Edinburgh Film Festival and was nominated for a BAFTA in 2007. 

In “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” the trio expand on the short (including adding new character Nell, who Mulligan plays) to make the sort of cozy crowdpleaser we don’t often get these days. Key stars as the oddball Charles, who has used his lottery wins (yes, plural) to finance his solitary life on a far-flung island off the coast of Wales. When we meet him, he’s used his financial windfall to entice two visitors to the island: Singers Herb McGwyer (Basden) and Nell Mortimer (Mulligan). As Mortimer McGwyer, the duo were Charles and his dearly departed wife’s favorite band, but they’ve long since broken up (personally and professionally), and their reunion on Wallis Island comes as a major shock to both of them.

“It took a while to unlock the potential of what that story could expand into, and really, the key to it was unlocking this character of Nell,” Griffiths told IndieWire. “When we started those early conversations of how important that character was, and how important the person who was going to play that character was, [it was about] their understanding of this chemistry that Tom and Tim have. That person had to be really confident in their own voice and their own sense of their process. Carey is really present, so we all had a kind of shared ethos, which is just trying to find an authenticity or a truth in these characters and the way they rubbed up alongside each other.”

Authenticity was easy to come by, mostly because Mulligan entered the world of Key and Basden (long-time collaborators, comedic gems, and best friends) through the very genuine fandom of her husband, Mumford & Sons’ lead singer Marcus Mumford.

“Basically, Marcus was a huge fan of the ‘Late Night Poetry Programme’ that Tim did with Tom,” Mulligan said. “He would play it all the time, we started listening to that, and it’s just the funniest show. That’s how I was introduced to both of them. It’s a big part of our family and life at home.”

Turns out, if Marcus Mumford likes your work, he’s not shy about sharing it.

“Literally, I think Marcus [direct messaged] Tim Key, which he actually does pretty regularly, and he was like, ‘I just want to say we just think you’re great, we’re huge fans of your work, whatever,’ and then Tim had written back something really nice,” she said. “Marcus and I do this fundraiser every year for this charity that we work with, War Child, and we always have a comedian host it. One year, our host had to pull out last minute for an emergency, so I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, let’s try Tim Key!’”

Mulligan and Mumford managed to procure Key’s email address, and shot off an ask. Key declined (“with a very nice email”), but Mulligan totally gets why. “Now that I know Tim, I’m like, Tim is not a hosting-charity-event kind of comedian,” she said. “He’d do anything in the world for anybody, he’s a complete empath, compassionate, wonderful, incredibly giving person. … But he would absolutely hate it.”

While that particular ask didn’t bear fruit, it did put Mulligan and Key into more regular contact. So when Mulligan’s name kept coming up for the role of Nell, Key had an in. Griffiths recalled with a laugh, “We were talking about her being the best person for the role, and Tim said, ‘Oh, I know her.’ We’re like, ‘What? That’s ridiculous. No, you don’t.’ He goes, ‘Oh, I’ll just ask.’”

Key did just that, asking Mulligan in early 2023 if she wanted to read a script he and Basden had been noodling on. She happily accepted, and she loved it.

“I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, I want there to be more things like this in the world,’” Mulligan said. “The sense of generosity toward one another in the story, that’s the thing that really stood out to me. This is about your capacity to be generous to other people and to be positive, but also to have an open heart and to be compassionate for the people that you might not necessarily, at first glance, understand or connect with. It’s so generous and warm, but not sentimental and not icky. It just speaks to the best bits of people.”

And these people felt real. “How do people behave in real life?,” Mulligan said. “I find that a lot of the time, I read things and think, ‘That’s not how people are.’ Can we just have more films about how people are? It was a refreshing read. The writing was just so brilliant.”

There was one tiny wrinkle: Mulligan was about to have her third child. The boys didn’t balk. “We jumped on the phone and I was like, ‘I love it. I’d love to do it, but I’m having a baby right before you want to do it. I would come with all of my children, but now also including my smallest, newest one,’” Mulligan recalled. “And Tim was like, ‘Great!’”

At the film’s world premiere at Sundance in January, Griffiths was quick to mention the participation of Mulligan and Mumford’s youngest. Even now, he still sees her as their mascot. “To be honest, we were so grateful that Carey said she was going to do it, she could have brought a whole host of babies,” he told IndieWire in March. “She could have brought triplets, I would have been over the moon. We were going to make it work regardless.”

Mulligan brought the baby, the rest of her kids, even her mom to set. “The baby was on set every day, just upstairs in a room with my mom, so every time I wasn’t on camera, I’d go up and feed her and be with her,” the actress said.

The entire production felt “very family-friendly,” Mulligan said, warm-hearted and generous, just like the film itself. Even when the baby made her presence known, the boys ran with it. “Every time there was a little noise from her, a cry or whatever, they would pass it off,” Mulligan said with a laugh. Pass it off as what? A smiling Griffiths explained: “Whenever she cried, I said, ‘Oh, we’ll just put a seagull cry over that.”

Joining such a merry band of long-term collaborators and close friends would likely feel daunting to most people. Not Mulligan, who said she felt welcomed from the very start.

“They do have such a history with each other, and so I’m sure there was a version of this that would feel like I was on the outside of something, but not with them,” she said. “I never felt like a third wheel or a spare part in this relationship. … There was a world where it would have been like, ‘Oh God, I’m the one who doesn’t know anyone,’ but they were so lovely and I didn’t for a second ever feel like that. I know the backstory to basically all of their inside jokes, their nicknames, I know all their anecdotes. They have no exclusivity to their relationship.”

That ethos extended to all facets of the creation of “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” including the recording of an entire full-length Mortimer McGwyer album, which features both Basden and Mulligan singing in character. It will be available on streaming this week, with a physical vinyl edition to follow.

“Tom had written a few songs at the beginning, for the short, when it was just a solo folk singer, as Herb McGwyer,” Griffiths said. “And, over the years, he wrote more songs, hoping that we’d get to make the film. I think he was able to tell this musical story of their journey together. There’s those lovely songs that they have together, with the harmonies, and the way they connect, and it clearly feels undeniable that they had something special. They tell the story of their relationship.”

Mulligan still can’t believe it. “We made an album, by the way. Tom wrote an album!,” Mulligan said. “We recorded it in Marcus’ studio, it’s like a soundtrack album. It’s all Tom, but you hear some of it in the background of the movie, some of them quite prominently and some of them not very much. There’s tiny, tiny bits on the album where I sing a line here and there on my own, but for the most part, it’s always a duet and I’m normally just a harmony and he’ll always sing the melody.”

Singing is, of course, not totally new to Mulligan, who has previously sung in films like “Shame” and “Inside Llewyn Davis” before. But doing it alongside Basden did make her feel a bit better. “The singing on my own stuff is always a bit more nerve-wracking,” she said. “I think the part that would have scared me is playing his part and actually selling that he’s a professional and continues to be a professional musician. That is beyond my capabilities.”

In addition to all her on-screen contributions, Mulligan also executive produced the film alongside Griffiths, Basden, and Key. It’s an area she’s been moving into recently, first with Emerald Fennell’s “Promising Young Woman” and the upcoming second season of “Beef.”

“It’s a little bit of being able to have a formalized, well, slightly more formalized opinion, and you can look at various parts of the process and try and be useful in them,” she said of her producing work. “Whether that’s [something in the] script or you being helpful in things outside of just acting in it. I do enjoy that side of things, of working on making things feel better. I’m starting to basically dip my toe in. Now I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ve been doing this for twenty-something years now, I’m not the new person anymore, I have some ideas of how the good things work and what might help this.’ I think I’ve been emboldened by working with really brilliant people to be like, ‘Oh, it’s a nice thing to feel as involved as you can be in a helpful way.’”

And speaking of “Beef”! While Mulligan can’t say much about the second season of the Netflix hit, she couldn’t quite stop herself from gushing about her castmates, including long-time friend and co-star Oscar Isaac, plus Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny.

“Oh, my God. I mean, we’re having the most amazing time doing it,” Mulligan said. “Obviously, this is my third job with Oscar, and the first thing we did ever together was ‘Drive,’ which we shot here in LA 14, 15 years ago? 15, 16. Wait, 2010. Yeah, 15 years ago! It’s heaven. Charles Melton. I’m now the official organizer of the latest Charles Melton fan club. The sweetest. And Cailee is an incredible, incredible actress.”

She added with a laugh, “I’m surrounded by greatness and we’re having an amazing time, so yeah. But other than that, I obviously can’t say anything else.”

Getting excited about work isn’t a small thing to Mulligan, and it’s clear when she talks about her recent choices that she’s feeling especially inspired these days. What’s next?

“I just want to work on great writing with exciting directors who have got a really clear idea of what they want to make,” she said. “I think if someone’s got a really strong point of view and you can get behind it, it doesn’t matter whether it lives or dies. In a way, to me, none of it is really about the aftermath. I don’t get enormous pleasure in watching the work afterwards. It’s so about the experience and doing it and if it’s someone you believe in and it’s a great part and great writing and having a great time, I don’t really care what ends up happening, as long as I get to carry on working and it doesn’t ruin my career.”

Focus Features will release “The Ballad of Wallis Island” in limited theaters on Friday, March 28.