In 2018, Bradley Cooper introduced “Maestro” to Carey Mulligan over coffee at Café Cluny in Manhattan. The film, which he would direct, co-write, produce and star in, was about Leonard Bernstein, the legendary director and composer who was married to a woman but often had affairs with men.
Cooper wanted Mulligan to play the wife of Bernstein's actor and painter, Felicia Montealegre. Over Zoom from London, Mulligan remembers her concern that day. “I knew very little about Leonard Bernstein and nothing about her,” Mulligan says.. “But he said, 'This won't be the story of the great man with a wife.' It will be about his relationship, his marriage.'”
She was on board.
The immediacy of his decision may have been aided by a shocking meeting just days earlier. Mulligan was on stage performing the one-woman drama “Girls & Boys” when a heavy piece of scenery fell on her head. “I went on with the show,” says Mulligan, who waited until after her final bow to retreat to her dressing room and, fearing he had suffered a life-threatening head injury, collapsed on the floor crying. .
That's when she was informed that Cooper was backstage waiting to say hello. “She found me in pieces,” says Mulligan, who remembers how after examining her, Cooper took her to the emergency room. She had suffered a concussion, and then some insight. “We had kind of a dramatic bonding moment, in retrospect,” she says.
Her faith in Cooper's tenderness and support generated by that interaction proved key. Based on the research he had done on the real-life Felicia, Cooper was sure that Mulligan was perfect for the role, he says in a phone call. “He looked a lot like Carey and in the same way [Carey] I was talking and moving, I thought, 'Well, Carey could really inhabit this person,'” Cooper says. “It was always very clear from the beginning.” But rather than casting Mulligan as Felicia and then leaving her alone regarding her preparation, she told him in that first conversation that she hoped she would join him in her own immersive and often unusual approach to acting. her.
“I felt like I really wanted to challenge myself as an actor, but I think I also wanted a partner in the whole process,” says Mulligan, who at age 18 applied to and was rejected by a number of drama schools and despite his critically acclaimed performances in theater and film they are largely self-taught. She admits that she had trouble imagining the journey she was about to embark on. “I don't think he knew the details, and it was the details that made me nervous as we got into the process.”
“I felt like he really wanted to challenge myself as an actor, but I think he also wanted a partner in the whole process,” Carey Mulligan says of Bradley Cooper.
(Jason McDonald/Netflix)
In interviews, Mulligan likes to laugh about how years before filming began, she was putting her children into bed, her cell phone rang, and on the other end of the line was Cooper, already in character, speaking in Bernstein's imposing New York. baritone. And he can point to a pivotal experience: In 2019, Mulligan and Cooper spent several days together rehearsing with singers and musicians and, eventually, narrating the Philadelphia Orchestra's staging of Leonard Bernstein's operetta “Candide” at the Kimmel Center in Performing Arts. “The adrenaline of sharing the performance together was kind of a cornerstone of the final film,” she says.
To capture her character's elegant mid-Atlantic accent, forged because Felicia was born in Costa Rica, grew up in Santiago, Chile, and vacations frequently in the United States, the British actress obsessively listened to every recorded interview of Felicia she could find. , of which, according to Jamie Bernstein, the eldest of Bernstein's three descendants, few existed.
“She had much less to draw on than Bradley in her preparation to play our father. [Bradley] She had infinite amounts of video, writing and photography, just infinite resources,” says Bernstein, who along with her siblings tried to make up for the inequalities, offering Mulligan her mother's gold-engraved lighter, one of her dresses and a light shawl. . Also, through Zoom conversations in which they appeared together, they sought to help Mulligan understand that despite her mother's impeccably elegant appearance or her willingness to let her happy husband take center stage, Felicia was “the driving force.” of our family as a unit.”
“I had this huge feeling that not only did they love her, but they really, really liked her,” Carey Mulligan says of her conversation with Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre's children about their mother.
(Jennifer McCord / for The Times)
“I had this huge feeling that not only did they love her, but they really, really liked her, and that was the same for anyone who met her,” says Mulligan, who found that talking to Felicia and Leonard's children offered insight. of Bernstein Family Energy. “It was chaos, the three overlapping, the anecdotes. It was like, 'Wow.' At first I started trying to take notes pretty diligently. And then after a while I was like, 'I can't write that fast.' “
However, the most challenging challenge she was asked to overcome was a week-long dream workshop with Cooper, which bared her soul and culminated in Mulligan writing and staging what she calls “ essentially a work of performance art,” set to some of his favorite themes. music. “Do it for someone else and make it up? That was the scariest thing I've ever done in my life, scarier than anything else,” Mulligan says. “I was incredibly excited. But then you cried in front of someone and told them all your secrets.
“I think when you make a movie about a marriage, about people giving their lives to each other, you can't act like that. That's the kind of story you have to feel is there, the weighty story of people who have shared a bed or not. You have to feel that these people are each other's second skin. And I think whatever happened in the end, that was it. From then on, honestly, it was a real marvel.”
Although Mulligan has been directed many times by other actors, appearing in a scene with someone who simultaneously recites the dialogue and directs was a first for her. Cooper regularly used hand signals with the sound mixer and camera operator. Often, Mulligan would walk around the set and realize the cameras were already rolling. In the middle of a heartbreaking scene in a doctor's office, when Cooper decided to change how he wanted the shot, Mulligan remembers how instead of cutting away, she simply talked to the dolly while Mulligan sobbed into his shoulder. “You can't see his mouth, [but] it's saying, 'Mango, get in, don't get out,'” Mulligan says.
“But it was the strangest thing. Instead of throwing me [off], it was strangely comforting. I loved the feeling that we were all one thing. Like Mango, the dolly grab suddenly became part of the scene somehow. And that would happen all the time. If you couldn't see his face [in the shot]“He was probably improvising, throwing things in to elicit a different response from you, or talking to the team.”
“I know myself as an actress and I know what challenges I want to take on,” Carey Mulligan says of her 20 years in the business.
(Jennifer McCord / for The Times)
The first time the Bernstein brothers saw “Maestro” in its final version was when it premiered at the Venice International Film Festival. According to Jamie Bernstein, she, her sister, and her brother compared Mulligan's ability to conjure up her mother to “a magic trick.” “Sometimes she made us gasp. She just vibed it. She amazed us how she was able to evoke our mother's unusual combination of strength, confidence and innate fragility. “That was our mother, and Carey was able to portray that so accurately and movingly.”
During the “Maestro” press tour, Mulligan has been asked repeatedly if she has converted to Cooper's approach to acting. Last summer, he spent a couple of weeks filming “One for the Money,” a comedy starring British comedians Tom Basden and Tim Key. “I didn't make a dream workshop for that,” he deadpans. “I was basically entertained by two comedians.” He then adds: “But [“Maestro”] enormously informed about how I work.”
Just as important, she says, is the fact that it recently occurred to her that she is no longer new to the job, that she has been a professional actress for two decades. “I don't feel cocky, but I feel more confident about myself now,” she says. “I know myself as an actor and I know what I want to challenge me.”
