Carey Mulligan confessed last week that occasionally she feels she’s a “terrible actor”, but now she’s admitted that, before she found success, she was rejected from every drama school she auditioned for… well, who’s laughing now?
Speaking to The New York Times' Arts & Leisure Weekend she revealed, “I went to boarding school when I was 14. I was a drama geek; I never fell into acting. I was obsessed with acting from a really young age. I just wanted to be in musicals and I wore a Les Misérables T-shirt for, like, four years, well into my teens.”
Talking about applying to drama school she said it “was the most rebellious thing I've ever done. I applied to drama school instead of university and got rejected from every one. And Drama Centre London told me to be a children's TV show presenter."
Looking back, Carey thinks the rejections might have been due to the material she was auditioning with, she revealed, "I did Psychosis 448, a monologue about someone who is about to commit suicide, as my audition speech. So there's this incredibly well-adjusted, happy person coming from boarding school and I'm miming slitting my wrists on stage.
"They were like, 'Go home! Or at least experience something other than boarding school'. So that's what I did."
What’s that old saying? It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish…