00:00 This line is probably one of my first lines I ever said on camera in a professional job
00:05 ever.
00:06 It may be my first line.
00:07 Hi, I'm Kerry Mulligan and I'm going to guess some of my film quotes.
00:11 [Music]
00:19 Ha ha ha, I don't want to lose my virginity to a piece of fruit is from an education.
00:25 I don't want to lose my virginity to a piece of fruit.
00:30 Being nominated for an education was insane.
00:32 I remember the first time I saw it I rang up my mum and I said, "Mum, it's so boring
00:37 and everyone's going to hate it."
00:38 And I said, "My face doesn't do anything and I look so stupid."
00:42 And I just found the whole thing sort of terrifying and then this whole whirlwind happened.
00:48 So when I was nominated it was like, I guess it's five in the morning, it was really early
00:52 and I was in LA.
00:53 I rang my mum and she was lecturing at the time, she was a lecturer at a university and
00:58 she was taking a class trip somewhere and she had just bollocked her class.
01:02 Can I say bollocked?
01:03 She had just bollocked her class for using their phones, you know, so she'd just been
01:08 like, "Put your phones away," whatever, and told them off.
01:10 So I rang her and it rang for ages and she finally picked up and she was like, "Hello?"
01:14 I said, "Mum, I just got nominated for an Oscar."
01:18 She went, "Darling, I'm just going to call you back," and then hung up and I was like,
01:24 "What the fuck?"
01:25 So then I just stood there and, you know, raged for a second and then I found out why
01:29 she had done that.
01:30 But yeah, it was just wild.
01:31 I don't think I even thought it was going to go into cinemas.
01:34 It was just this sort of tiny indie film that we shot in like a month and it was a completely
01:39 wild experience.
01:40 Oh, "I hope she'll be a fool.
01:44 That's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool," is from The
01:48 Great Gatsby.
01:49 And I hope she'll be a fool.
01:50 That's the best thing a girl in this world can be.
01:56 It was a bizarre thing because I went from sort of low-budget indie films, lots of British
02:01 TV and theatre, and then went to Sydney and made this enormous film.
02:07 But I remember thinking that Leo was so lovely.
02:10 Oh, I love him.
02:13 It didn't matter where the camera was, he was still incredible.
02:16 I sort of thought, well, when the camera's not on him, he doesn't want to do anything
02:20 as Leonardo DiCaprio.
02:21 And every time it was on me and he was like next to the camera or behind the lens, he
02:26 was just so...
02:27 It was as good as it was the other way around.
02:29 I thought that was so generous.
02:30 And it was all just mad.
02:32 It was such a mad sort of Baz Luhrmann sort of circus.
02:35 It was just so much bigger than anything I had been in that point.
02:39 I felt like the casting process was sort of like winning American Idol.
02:43 It was all so kind of big.
02:46 But I loved it.
02:47 It was a blast.
02:48 Can you guess what every woman's worst nightmare is?
02:51 Is from Promising Young Woman.
02:54 Can you guess what every woman's worst nightmare is?
02:57 I do remember that it's very hard to say...
03:00 I can't even do it now.
03:02 Woman...
03:03 Woman's worst nightmare.
03:04 At one point I said, can I call myself a girl instead?
03:08 Because it's easier to say in an American accent.
03:09 But woman's worst...
03:10 Anyway, I can't do it.
03:11 But yeah, very difficult to say.
03:13 Very good line.
03:14 When I found out I was nominated for Promising Young Woman, I was at home.
03:19 I decided to watch.
03:20 I wasn't going to.
03:21 I thought, I'll just not think about it.
03:23 I'll just go and mow the lawn or something.
03:26 And then I decided that I was going to watch it.
03:29 So my husband and I, he put it on his TV screen in the studio, away from the house, away from
03:35 the children.
03:36 But my name alphabetically is quite late in the alphabet.
03:38 So it really looked dicey for a second there.
03:40 And do you know what?
03:41 He'd written out a bunch of little Post-it notes and put them all over the screen of
03:46 reasons to not be sad if I wasn't nominated.
03:50 But anyway, we didn't need them in the end.
03:52 But it was, yeah, it was very lovely.
03:54 Emerald's direction was more, you know, she gave me a mood board.
03:57 She gave me music.
03:59 Britney Spears' Toxic was sort of top of the playlist.
04:02 Paris Hilton, Stars Are Blind.
04:04 You know, she kind of built the world for me.
04:06 It was kind of a holistic thing.
04:07 It was like, this is what it's going to look like, sound like, feel like.
04:09 It should be like a beautiful candy that you open and eat it and realize it was poisoned.
04:14 You know, that was always the sort of sense.
04:17 And there was an incredibly dark comedy to the whole thing.
04:22 We feel they'll speak out if they're not the only ones.
04:24 Safety in numbers.
04:25 That took me a second to, I thought it was Suffragette for a second.
04:29 That's from She Said.
04:31 We feel they'll speak out if they're not the only ones.
04:35 Safety in numbers.
04:36 The secret to playing Megan Toohey, I think, was first of all just not being completely
04:40 overwhelmed by how cool she is.
04:42 Megan Toohey and Jodie Cantor are such deeply impressive women.
04:46 And what I loved about the story was that it was putting at the forefront these women
04:50 who did ignite a movement that really changed the world.
04:53 You know, Megan and Jodie, but also the survivors that came forward.
04:56 So I think I felt humbled by the whole thing.
05:00 And what I loved about the way that Maria Schrader directed it is that there was sort
05:04 of lacking in sentimentality.
05:05 It was really factual.
05:06 There was something pragmatic about the film.
05:07 And I think that was putting forward just the truth.
05:10 Just things that were undeniable.
05:12 Like this film could be, this book that it was based on, She Said, but the film could
05:16 also be somewhat of a kind of time capsule just to say, "This happened irrefutably.
05:21 This has been proven that this happened."
05:23 And then the result is, we can all see and it's still happening today, but this moment
05:28 happened where all these brave women came forward and did this thing that seemed impossible.
05:34 And then the world has changed after that.
05:37 So I didn't think a huge amount about journalism, but more just sort of trying to honor who
05:42 she was as a person and her courage in doing what she did.
05:47 Oh, we need to build up a very strong connection.
05:53 This is from Maestro.
05:55 Oh, we need to build up a very strong connection.
05:59 Bradley said, "We're going to shoot this stuff where they were young and they were
06:02 sort of falling in love."
06:03 And we had this bit where we were sitting back to back and he said, "I want us to
06:08 play a game and we're just going to play a game and I'm going to film it and the
06:13 camera is going to come in on a crane shot and it's going to find us playing this game."
06:17 And my brother and I, when we were little, played this game where we would pretend that
06:21 we had a telepathic connection or I would pretend that we had it.
06:24 So my brother would tell my mom the number that he was thinking of and then he would
06:28 send it to me telepathically and out of sight my mom would go like that and I'd go, "Three."
06:36 And my brother was just completely blown away and he'd be like, "Oh my God, we're
06:39 psychic."
06:40 And for years, I mean for years, until we were teenagers, this carried on.
06:43 Anyways, when we were sitting in the scene, I thought, "Well, let's play the numbers
06:47 game."
06:48 So we started the scene and I said, "Give me a number between one and ten."
06:51 And so that's how we kind of started playing that game and then play it again later in
06:55 the film and it became their kind of little motif.
06:58 It was amazing because what he did as a director, you know, sometimes he would give me notes
07:02 traditionally like directors do, but more often than that he would direct me through
07:08 his performance.
07:09 So he would, as Lenny, do a scene and the way that he was molding the take, it would
07:14 be to elicit a certain response out of me.
07:16 So he was directing me by changing his performance to make my performance change.
07:21 So it was so subtle, you kind of didn't feel like you were being directed.
07:25 You know, he'd done five years of preps, by the time he got on set, he just was that
07:28 character.
07:29 So I didn't, you know, took a lot of the acting out of it for me because, you know,
07:34 it was just responding to someone.
07:42 The regiments are coming.
07:43 They're to be stationed the whole winter in the village just right there.
07:48 The period drama.
07:52 Far From the Madden crowd or Pride and Prejudice.
07:54 Oh, the regiments are coming.
07:57 Excited Kitty Bennett acting.
07:59 Yeah.
08:00 The regiments are coming.
08:01 They're to be stationed the whole winter.
08:04 This line is probably one of my first lines I ever said on camera in a professional job
08:09 ever.
08:10 It may be my first line.
08:11 I think I only had about six lines in Pride and Prejudice, but I was in it a lot because
08:16 I was sort of in it just giggling in the background and sort of running around parties with Jenna
08:20 Malone.
08:21 But this was one of my lines.
08:22 I was 19.
08:23 I turned 19 on the job.
08:24 Yeah.
08:25 So I was 18 when we started shooting.
08:27 I turned 19 like a week into filming.
08:30 Yeah.
08:31 I love Jenna Malone so much.
08:33 I also had no idea what I was doing.
08:35 I mean, I really had no idea what I was doing.
08:37 Lydia and Kitty were sort of somewhat like twins.
08:40 So I just copied her.
08:41 I just did everything that she did.
08:43 She was such a pro and she really took me under her wing and was so wonderful to me.
08:49 All of the sisters, we all just loved each other.
08:50 It was like a real family.
08:51 It was so lovely.
08:52 I loved it.
08:52 [Music]
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