Carey Mulligan Is Changing Her Tune

"Everything is going to be fine," Carey Mulligan croons from her London flat, her voice lightly charred from a lingering winter bug and her blonde bob—which is now kissing the top of her shoulders—finger-combed to the side. She's preparing me not for an upcoming root canal or some other mundane torture but for a steady life with my partner, who I married five months ago to this day. It's a far cry from the standard squeals one might expect from declaring their newlywed status, but the reassurance is fitting in the wry, evocative way only Mulligan and her saucer-eyed gaze can convey. After all, we've just spent the last 40 minutes rehashing season 2 of Beef, an eight-episode dark comedy-drama exposing a relationship that is decidedly, uh, not fine. Resentment, blackmail, and a crippling sense of "How the hell did I get here?"—spooky stuff for a blushing bride.

In Lee Sung Jin's (also known as Sonny Lee) latest installment landing on Netflix on April 16, Mulligan plays Lindsay Crane-Martín, an aspiring interior designer married to the general manager of an elite country club. Ever the doting wife—at least in public—she helps her husband Josh (Oscar Isaac) with various to-dos, planning fundraisers, picking out pillow fabrics, and the like. Beyond that, Lindsay's identity remains… uncertain.

"I came up against this question constantly with Sonny and Oscar when starting this job. Who is she? I was struggling to pin her down because she adapts herself for lots of different situations," Mulligan says. "I think the ultimate answer to it was she doesn't really know." It's a terrifying realization to brush up against, especially for someone who's attached her entire existence to a marriage that ultimately unravels at the seams. And so comes the titular beef.

In the first five minutes of episode 1, what starts with simmering marital rage ends with an explosion of violence and a gasped confession from Mulligan: "You've wasted my whole life." (Lee wrote the line day-of, she reveals.) The panic that time has evaporated is something she can empathize with, albeit on a much smaller scale. She tells me of the time one of her children was learning to play the recorder, and Mulligan, in a moment of headache-induced exasperation, decided to hide the instrument on top of the dresser. It lay there completely forgotten for two years. "I was like, 'God, I could have gone another 15 years without noticing that was up there had I chosen not to dust the top of my dresser,'" she says. It's unnerving how stretches of life can slip through your fingers just like that.

"I think that's where Lindsay starts in episode 1," Mulligan continues. "[It's] like, 'Fuck, this time has passed. What am I going to do? How do I get it back?' That sends her into this slightly manic burst of energy in lots of different directions." That initial burst has an audience: the recently engaged Austin Davis (Charles Melton) and Ashley Miller (Cailee Spaeny), who wind up using this knowledge to leverage their own lower-level positions at the club. And so comes more beef.

Fans of the miniseries will be pleased to learn its next chapter is just as artistically berserk as its Emmy-winning first season with opulent visuals, cringey plot twists, and manipulative, The White Lotus–esque characters you love to hate yet somehow find yourself rooting for. Yes, this includes the insufferable Lindsay. "God, she's really awful and annoying," Mulligan says of her initial reaction to the script. "I love the idea of playing that."

I can imagine it's quite a thrill to try on your polar opposite for size. Mulligan, swathed in a simple black sweater and sipping on a cauldron-sized beverage when she joins our Zoom call, has a cool, unfussy energy that's the antithesis to Lindsay's frenetic meltdowns. Her delicate features—a heart-shaped face, those saucer eyes—are offset by a throaty English accent that's a pitch deeper thanks to the cold she can't shake. "I'm fine," she vows. "I've got my giant mug of tea." She breaks out the dimples, ready to work.

This wouldn't be Mulligan's first time portraying the unlikable woman, but something about Lindsay felt different—frenzied, free, and just plain fun. "I didn't know what I wanted to do next work-wise. I had just done the whole run for Maestro, and I was waiting for the right job to come along," she tells me. She did the coquettish romantic lead in The Great Gatsby. She aced the grief-stricken, revenge-seeking survivor in Promising Young Woman, a role that earned her an Oscar nomination. She played the troubled, free-spirited sister in Shame; the tenacious investigative journalist in She Said; and the tragically lost, narcissistic socialite in Saltburn. "I don't want to be the super serious person in every film or dying in every film," Mulligan adds. "I don't want to get stuck in a rut of any particular 'known' thing."

Then Lee pitched her episode 5 of Beef, which, in my opinion, has one of the most unhinged scenes in the entire season. (Without spoiling anything, I'll just say that no animals or animalistic wives were harmed in the making of this show.) "I was like, 'Oh, that's insane and feral,'" Mulligan laughs. "And I loved it."

Lee also has strong ties to music and meticulously selects songs to match the emotional weight of each scene, ticking another box in Mulligan's mind. "I love when a director has a playlist. It helps so much with the tone of things," she says. Music cues scored by 11-time Grammy winner Finneas O'Connell were already written into the script prior to filming, which helped Mulligan and Isaac further connect to their characters during particularly intense moments. Isaac even suggested wearing earwigs while they filmed so they could hear those cues in real time.

"I've never listened to music while doing scenes. Most of the time, I'll listen to [a playlist] on my phone in the morning while I'm in the trailer or whatever," Mulligan says. "Oscar had done this on other jobs where he had the earwig in, so he was like, 'Let's just try it.'" Her dimples resurface when she adds, "Sonny said it cost them a huge amount of money to paint out in [post-production], which I feel really bad about, but it was great."

Mulligan created her own playlist prior to filming—prep work she completes for each role to help her enter the mind of that character. Lindsay's track list (simply named "Lindsay") includes "All in Good Time" by Iron & Wine and Fiona Apple; "Antarctica" by Divorce featuring her own husband, Marcus Mumford ("That's a song that we listened to a lot," Mulligan says as she thumbs through her phone, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear); "Song for Zula" by Phosphorescent; and, hilariously, Carol Burnett's "Little Girls" from Annie. "For whatever reason, one day I was like, 'That's Lindsay! She's Miss Hannigan!'" she laughs. "It's a little bit all over the map."

Growing up, Mulligan was enamored with musical theater and, up until her late teens, dreamed of performing on Broadway. Still, music remains central to her work in one way or another, whether she's stuffing headphones into her ears to distract herself from a crowded theater audience or swapping playlists with her film costar during moments of downtime. As if she attracts instrumental roles, many of her projects have a musical nucleus. Maestro explores the relationship between composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein and actress Felicia Montealegre; Inside Llewyn Davis follows a struggling folk singer (portrayed by Isaac); in The Ballad of Wallis Island, estranged bandmates reunite for a final private performance; and let's not forget about Mulligan's soul-crushing rendition of "New York, New York" in Shame, which sends a chill up my spine every time.

"I've always loved music as storytelling. I've always found it very emotional," she says. Of course, she also credits Mumford for inspiration. "I love watching musicians. I just think it's the coolest thing in the world to be able to pick up a guitar and sing a song or play the piano," she notes. "Doing Ballad of Wallis Island was so fun to pretend to be one of those people because I am around it a lot."

This season of Beef kicks off with a literal bang ("It's quite fun, smashing up a trophy cabinet," Mulligan admits), and the physical and emotional turbulence refuses to pump the brakes. I mention it must have been taxing to harbor so much hate—especially toward someone like Isaac, who she considers a close friend since they met on the set of Drive 15 years ago—but she tells me the tense fight scenes were actually some of the most exhilarating. "I really trust him as an actor and as a person. I felt like I could do my worst acting, and he wouldn't be judgmental," she says. "This show requires you to do stuff that's slightly mad. You have to put [everything] on the table, and he was the perfect person to do that with."

Funny enough, "The timeline of Josh and Lindsay's relationship is the length of mine and Oscar's," she adds, which helped them create a narrative around their on-screen marriage. "We mapped out our little fake life from the time that we met on Drive. Over the years, our families have stayed really close, so we had so much history to pack into it." Coming together for Beef felt like slipping back into a well-worn sweater, the 15-year gap nothing more than a blip in Mulligan's eyes.

"It was weird for Oscar and I to feel like the grown-ups. We were the kids on Drive," she says. To be fair, the age difference between the two couples isn't actually that vast (Mulligan and Melton are five years apart, for reference), but their respective roles are meant to reflect the great millennial and Gen Z divide. "Everyone called [Melton and Spaeny] the kids. We'd finish a scene and be like, 'Okay, we're done. The kids are in next, right?'" she adds.

Unlike Lindsay's Miss Hannigan–esque sneer, the label was steeped in love. Rest assured, there was absolutely no beef on set. "I didn't know those guys at all beforehand. We met in L.A. a week before we started shooting, and the fact that we all got on so well was beautiful," Mulligan shares. In fact, Spaeny and Melton came to watch Mulligan and Isaac film the very last scene in the entire series. "We all stood in a circle, Sonny came in, and the five of us just sobbed in the middle of the street," she recounts. "We were all really emotional to have done this thing together. I think we could have carried on for a bit longer."

It's this closeness—and the thought of reuniting all dolled up for the upcoming press tour—that makes Mulligan less wary of what viewers will think of the sophomore season. (Beef season 1 was, by and large, a smashing success, securing eight Emmy wins and three Golden Globes.) "It's always nerve-racking to do a follow-up," Mulligan tells me. "I think [any pressure] has been superseded by the excitement to create a story that's really worth telling." Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, who starred in the critically acclaimed season 1, remain intimately involved as executive producers. "We all had a big cast dinner before we started shooting. It feels like a big team effort," Mulligan shares. When you have that strong of a support system, all the comparison chatter fades to the background.

In Beef, Lindsay and Josh's union could not be further removed from Mulligan and Mumford's ("It made me grateful for my relationship," she says), who tied the knot nearly 14 years ago in 2012. Perhaps subconsciously for my own newlywed gains, I decide to ask her if there's any marital advice she would give Lindsay as a friend. "I always think the best advice is keeping short accounts," she responds. "Don't hold on to grudges, and if you're annoyed about something, just say you're annoyed about it and figure it out. Don't let it simmer."

Oh, and one more thing. "Put your phone down. Stop living online," she declares. "[Lindsay] has such crushingly low self-esteem that she's just looking for an immediate hit to make herself feel better for two seconds, and then it inevitably crumbles. That would probably be my biggest advice. Get yourself a dumbphone, Lindsay."

While Mulligan herself has succumbed to the smartphone ("I'm on, like, 50,000 different parenting WhatsApp groups for my children, and I'm inevitably going to forget to send someone to school with some crucial piece of uniform if I'm not on them," she jokes), she keeps the digital world at arm's length. Unlike Lindsay, who's constantly DMing old flames and stalking their profiles, Mulligan doesn't have any form of social media. She's notoriously low-key, residing in a dreamy 16th-century farmhouse in the Devon countryside. Instead, she provides glimpses of glamour through selective fashion campaigns (Mulligan is currently an ambassador for Prada) and award-circuit appearances—such as her 2024 Oscars ensemble, which is frequently cited as one of the best looks to ever exist. "It's in my flat! I have it!" she says of the archival Balenciaga dress.

I can't help but ask about the style moments in her next major project Narnia, Greta Gerwig's highly anticipated Netflix adaptation premiering in theaters on Thanksgiving Day and on the streamer in December. Mulligan has remained rather tight-lipped about her character and the experience as a whole, but I'm curious if there's anything she can spill about the film's fashion vibe. Alas, no dice. "I literally can't say an actual word, as much as I would love to, except that it was just heaven," she smiles. "I've always wanted to work with Greta and want to work with Greta forever."

She wrapped the project just before Christmas and has reveled in the nice stretch of normalcy before she soon embarks on the whirlwind Beef press run. From there, she's looking at an infinite horizon. "I'd love to do theater again," she muses, propping her chin on her palm, when I probe her about any dream projects. "That's tricky. You need to figure that out with children." But when it comes to her next role, Mulligan doesn't have a specific North Star in mind, except that it should feel somewhat scary. "All [my characters] have been slightly daunting prospects to play, in a good way," she says. What jumps out to her on the page is a role she doesn't immediately know how to embrace—something that plays hard to get before she firmly decides it's the one.

"Hopefully, it'll come along," she shrugs with a curl of the lips and the easy confidence of someone who knows, without a shadow of a doubt, everything is going to be just fine.

Photographer: Gina Gizella Manning
Stylist: Jenny Kennedy
Hairstylist: Shon Ju at The Wall Group
Makeup Artist: Valeria Ferreira at The Wall Group
Manicurist: Sabrina Gayle at Arch the Agency using Bio Sculpture
Creative Director: Amy Armani
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Video Director and Producer: Sarah Al Slaity
DP: Charlotte Croft
Special thanks to Dennis Severs' House