Carey Mulligan is promoting Maestro, in which she plays Leonard Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre, and Vogue assures me that this promotional shoot and interview was completed prior to the SAG strike. I believe this but as the strike drags on…they’re gonna run out of actors. Musicians and models, this is your time! Anyway, I suppose it’s apt that she’s promoting a piece about musical geniuses, as this shot reminds me of my favorite song as a child: “Sister Suffragette” from Mary Poppins, a song which perhaps unduly influenced my take on men. Otherwise, while I appreciate that this cover is unusual for Vogue and has a wonderful sense of movement, I predict it will not sell well. But, truly, does any glossy magazine sell well anymore? Maybe they should just do what they like with the time they have left.
The interview itself is absolutely fine; Mulligan is not a particularly interesting subject because she is so private (good for her!) and, I suspect, so truly normal (ditto). She wants to talk about her creative projects and that’s about it and that’s absolutely the right call for any person, really, but it makes the profile a bit flat as a project for the writer, I suspect. Although I do want to give Vogue credit for finally truly axing their “she ordered a salad and stared at me with luminous eyes” schtick, a trope they used to drag out constantly with these profiles (which all used to be written by the same few dudes). And I thought this bit was intriguing:
“This was the most intense preparation I’ve ever done for a film,” Mulligan continues. There was the technical stuff—nailing Felicia’s accent and bearing—but most vital, she says, was tapping into the Felicia-Lenny connection. To manage that, she and Cooper had to meet each other in the numinous realm: Operating well outside her usual instinctive process, Mulligan joined Cooper for a five-day “dream workshop.” “I guess Bradley’s been doing this kind of thing forever, using your dreams to connect your subconscious to the character’s, but it was new to me,” she recalls, shaking her head. “But I had to go all in.”
Can you imagine being forced to go to a dream workshop for work? For a whole business week? I hope they paid her for that. But mostly, I love her sharp bob in the editorial shoots. Listen, if Anna knows anything…
[Credits: Writer: Maya Singer; Photographer: Jack Davison; Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman; Hair: Mari Ohashi’ Makeup: Niamh Quinn. Vogue’s November 2023 issue is available on newsstands nationwide on October 24th.]
