Carey Mulligan: 'Pictures of angels helped with Girls & Boys play panic attacks'

Girls & Boys: Carey Mulligan stars in the one-woman play transferring to New York
Walter McBride/WireImage
Miranda Bryant4 June 2018

Carey Mulligan has revealed how she decorated her dressing room for her latest play with specially-created artworks to help relieve her stage fright.

As the sole star of Girls & Boys – a one-woman play about male violence which transfers from the Royal Court to New York next week — Mulligan, 33, started getting panic attacks during rehearsals for the London run earlier this year and said she feared “being on my own on stage”.

Her friend, Brixton-based artist Charlie Mackesy, created a series of encouraging drawings for her dressing room.

Mulligan, star of Collateral, Drive and The Great Gatsby, has previously used poetry to help her get in the mindset for stage roles. She told the Standard: “I had a really hard time coming into the show in London. About four weeks into rehearsal, right before previews, I just started having sort of panic attacks and things because I just got very bad anxiety around, I suppose, being on my own on stage.

“And he [Mackesy] was amazing. He does these beautiful drawings of angels and things and so he just sat down one day and did all these sketches, incredible pictures of a person on stage who’s meant to be me… then behind there’s an angel leaning down pushing me on the shoulder, sort of pushing me forward.”

After strong reactions in London — some audience members walked out and fainted during the play — Mulligan, whose character describes the breakdown of her marriage, said she is looking forward to seeing how people respond in New York. She thinks it will “strike a chord” there, especially in light of the #MeToo movement and the debate around US gun violence.

She finds the tragic play “challenging” and said the first time she read it, on her mobile phone, its shocking content made her drop the phone.

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Mulligan, who has two children with her husband, musician Marcus Mumford, is unsure what some of the play’s British jokes will mean to US audiences...“are they going to know what an easyJet flight is?”

Girls & Boys, being staged off Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theatre, is her fourth time on stage in New York.

The last time was in 2015, alongside Bill Nighy in David Hare’s Skylight.

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