27 December 2017
Newsdesk
Carey Mulligan was six weeks pregnant when she was offered the lead in TV series Collateral and creator David Hare didn't let her big news affect the production.
In the upcoming four-part thriller, the British actress plays Detective Inspector Kip Glaspie, who is investigating the spiraling consequences following the fatal shooting of a pizza delivery man.
She was offered the role when she was six weeks pregnant, but when she revealed the news to acclaimed playwright Hare, who she had previously worked with while pregnant on the revival of his play Skylight, he barely batted an eyelid.
"I wrote to him and said: 'You'll never guess, but I'm pregnant again. So can I do it pregnant?'" she recalled to Vogue Australia. "He said: 'I don't see why not.'"
Although her physical appearance would be changing, Hare, who was making his first original TV series, decided not to alter her character's story.
"I loved that he didn't rewrite my character, that he just didn't make a fuss about it. It felt more real to life, because when you're pregnant you do just go about your life," she explained.
Carey gave birth to a son named Wilfred in August (17) and brought him along to her high-fashion cover shoot, where she would breastfeed him between shots. She is used to getting straight back to work after having a child - the promotion for her movie Suffragette started very soon after she welcomed her daughter Evelyn in September, 2015, with husband Marcus Mumford.
"We started press for Suffragette like three weeks after I gave birth to my daughter, so you just get back into it and it's fine, because it's not like filming, where you need to use your brain all the time. It's much more about kind of showing up," she added.
Besides the release of Collateral, a co-production between BBC Two and Netflix, Carey will also return to the stage in 2018 with one-women show Girls & Boys at London's Royal Court Theatre, and she admits she is nervous about previews.
"In theatre, once you get through the initial previews, which are f**king unbearably nerve-racking - I don't even know how I'm going to do this one - you kind of get in your stride and then it feels great," she confessed.
