Carey Mulligan, last seen giving a tantalizingly off-kilter performance as the damaged sister in “Shame,” has chosen another fallen angel for her next role.
In the black-comedy thriller “Nancy and Danny,” according to the Hollywood Reporter, the 27-year-old British actress will play “a money-hungry woman” who retreats from big-city failure to try and snare a high-school crush and “uses a hapless man as a pawn in a get-rich-quick scheme that quickly goes wrong.” The anti-heroine’s machinations and the small-town settings of Brad Inglesby’s script is earning it comparison with Gus Van Sant’s “To Die For,” the 1995 film that made a bona fide star of Nicole Kidman.
With director Scott Cooper, Inglesby c0-wrote 2013’s “Out of the Furnace,” a thriller starring Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson, Zoe Saldana, and Willem Dafoe that sounds like it was inspired by the 1947 Jacques Tourneur noir masterpiece “Out of the Past.” “Nancy and Danny” will be directed by James Marsh, whose films include the documentaries “Man on Wire” and “Project Nim” and the upcoming IRA thriller “Shadow Dancer.”
A Hollywood Reporter source said Mulligan “pursued the part” in “Nancy and Danny.” Pacing her career, she is highly selective about her choices. She has had six films released since her 2009 breakout in “An Education,” but has been the protagonist in none of them, sharing the lead in “Never Let Me Go” with Keira Knightley (and giving one of her most arrestingly melancholy performances in that underrated futuristic drama).
Since “Shame,” Mulligan has completed her parts as Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” and as a woman involved in the early 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene in the Coen Brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis” (see a photo here).
If the trailer for “Gatsby” is anything to go by, Mulligan has caught the essence of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy, one of the most vapid, oblivious, and passively sensual women characters in modern literature. However, Warner Bros. has moved Luhrmann’s extravaganza – in which the Jazz Age will seemingly be filtered through a Studio 54 sensibility – from the holiday season to next summer, hinting that its production values are its biggest selling point, as was the case with the director’s “Moulin Rouge.” Whether that threatens Mulligan’s chances of getting a second Oscar nomination is moot.
Read an interview with Mulligan on "An Education" here and my recent essay on her here.
Below: trailer for "The Great Gatsby"
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