Carey Mulligan to return to a New York stage
The elfin actress who shot to fame with the film "An Education" will star in an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's 1961 movie, "Through a Glass Darkly." The adaptation will premiere off-Broadway starting May 13.
Mulligan, 25, will play an intense young woman harrowed by psychiatric illness who spirals out of control while on holiday off the coast of Sweden with her husband, novelist father and brother.
"It's an incredible descent into insanity. It's horribly scary and I have no idea what I'm going to do," she says by phone from Los Angeles.
Mulligan made her Broadway debut in 2008 in "The Seagull" opposite Peter Sarsgaard and Kristin Scott Thomas when the play moved from London to New York. She says that was a dream come true and left her itching for more stage work.
"I'm more consumed by theater than I am by film," she says. "I never set out really to be a film actress. I love it and I'm incredibly lucky, but I find it easier to throw myself into a play than film. I'm always much more self-aware and self-conscious when I'm doing film because cameras really freak me out."
The new work — the only film Bergman gave permission to be adapted for the stage — will be directed by David Leveaux and produced by the Atlantic Theater Company.
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It will be staged at the New York Theater Workshop in the East Village and will run from May 13 to July 3. The adaptation made its world premiere at the Almeida Theatre in London last summer.
Mulligan appeared in London in "Forty Winks" by Kevin Elyot at the Royal Court Theatre in 2004 and in a production of Moliere's "The Hypochondriac" in 2005.
She won the role of Kitty Bennet in "Pride & Prejudice," the 2005 film adaptation of the Jane Austen novel. She is perhaps best known for "An Education," for which she was Oscar-nominated as the daring London schoolgirl who gets mixed up with an older man.
Though her film career is red-hot, the allure of the stage remained for Mulligan. She recalls recently watching her friend Zoe Kazan — her co-star in "The Seagull" — in the off-Broadway production of "Angels in America."
"I walked away gutted that I wasn't in a play," Mulligan says. "I got to the point where I missed theater so much I'd go to plays and be distracted by how jealous I was."
The British-born actress now considers herself a New Yorker, having moved to the city around Christmas. "It's thrilling. All I literally as a child wanted to do was be in a Broadway play and live in New York. I'm kind of on cloud nine."