Wait a minute – is that… Carey Mulligan? This great Bafta-winning British actress is the queen of containment. Think of her quietly heartbroken Kathy H in Never Let Me Go (2010), cloned and reared to donate her organs and die young like all of her friends, in the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. Or her slow, sinister rendition of “New York, New York” in Steve McQueen’s Shame (2011) – unbearable. For two decades, Mulligan has concentrated not on the grand gesture but on what is withheld. But in season two of Netflix’s darkly comic Beef, the dam finally breaks.
In one scene, her character, pushed to the brink, defends her dachshund from a snarling coyote, body-slamming it to its death in a paroxysm of white-hot anger. It feels like we’ve been building towards this – all those years of simmering emotion, arriving here, in the woods, with a dead critter and a pooch called Burberry.
This is the joy of Netflix’s darkly comic anthology series – it’s full of surprises. Season two trades the road rage plot of series one (which starred Steven Yeun and Ali Wong) for the rarefied world of an elite country club, where the crumbling marriage of Mulligan’s Lindsay Crane-Martin and her beleaguered husband, played by Oscar Isaac, is laid bare when two young members of staff, burdened by a debt they can’t escape, film the couple's blazing domestic row and begin to wonder what it might be worth. A tale of blackmail, coercion and escalating bad faith follows, as Lindsay deals with the “immense pain of knowing that you picked the wrong person”.
With plenty of pizzazz and cruel unsentimentality, Lee Sung Jin has fashioned a second season that ducks and weaves, finding space for zeitgeisty social commentary and arch humour amid all the chaos. Carved with laser-guided precision, it’s slick and fleet-footed, deftly coaxing out the neuroses of its characters. Mulligan is superb, all cut-glass acerbity and, for the most part, tamped-down fury.
At one point, Lindsay is asked by her husband what is wrong with kids these days. “Entitlement,” she hisses. “Sorry, if I’d pulled this s*** back at Soho House, Kevin Nader would’ve cut my f***ing bollocks off.” In a screening room, it gets a huge laugh. Not that we should be surprised about that – her Nell in last year’s The Ballad of Wallis Island was a delight; her cameo as Poor Dear Pamela in Saltburn (2023) was a masterclass in comic timing. But Beef gives her multiple registers at once.
The baffling thing is that Mulligan seems, despite three Oscar nominations – for An Education (2009), Promising Young Woman (2020) and Maestro (2023) – still rather under-appreciated. As anyone who witnessed her shattering solo turn in the Royal Court’s Girls & Boys (2018) will attest, she really is one of the great actors of her generation.
Born in Westminster, Mulligan had a peripatetic early childhood – her father’s career in hotel management taking the family to Germany when she was three – before a fan letter she wrote to Julian Fellowes after a school visit secured her first professional audition. “There’s not many places to go for women after you’ve played Nina,” she once said of her early role in a Royal Court production of The Seagull – and everything since has been, in some sense, a search for that kind of gravity.
Her agent’s advice – don’t do anything unless you can’t bear the idea of anybody else doing it – has shaped a filmography of wilful brilliance. She pursued the role of Sissy in Shame with a vehemence that was, by her own admission, entirely out of character – swearing at Steve McQueen across a coffee shop table until he relented. She has always loathed anything she might describe as actorly: “I never wanted to isolate myself from people by doing anything excruciating like staying in your dialect between takes.” The Coen brothers, who cast her against type in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), their melancholy comedy about a struggling folk singer (also starring Isaac), summed her up neatly: “Sweet, and shy, but there’s also a very no-nonsense side – she came in and got right down to business. That is one of those weird paradoxes you get with a lot of performers.”
For Maestro, she was persuaded by Cooper to abandon that reticence – staying in character between takes, enduring a week in a dream workshop, attending three months of art classes for a single painting scene that ended up being cut – while at home, her husband Marcus Mumford arranged Post-it notes around the television with encouraging mottos, just in case. She had spent years calling him “such an artist” while thinking of herself as “just an actor”. Hers is a career built in the lower key, with a body of work that speaks for itself.
In An Education, beneath a veneer of Oxbridge sophistication, she imbued Jenny with a heartbreaking vulnerability – a girl seduced not so much by a man as by the idea of a larger life. Modulating wit with savvy, warmth with a bone-deep weariness, Mulligan was incandescent, too, in Wildlife (2018). In Maestro, acted with the vim of a golden-age melodrama, she played Felicia Montealegre through three decades of a marriage to a man constitutionally incapable of fidelity, slipping subtly between devotion and despair without once descending into self-pity. She crackled with a visionary energy that outlasted the awards conversation surrounding the film.
When Meryl Streep presented her with the international star of the year award at Palm Springs 2024, the 76-year-old summarised Mulligan’s performances adroitly: “The emotion is always palpable and full and felt, but it’s often tucked away and maybe disguised or hidden in reserve.” If Mulligan’s career has been defined by what she holds back, Lindsay Crane-Martín is what happens when she finally lets it go. The tonal mix is unique, and it sings. Watching Mulligan play her – funny and ferocious, unleashed in ways we haven’t quite seen before – I thought of what Bradley Cooper apparently said when he watched her continue through a Royal Court monologue with a gigantic stage curtain on her head, unflinching. “She’ll never quit.” He was right.
‘Beef’ series two is on Netflix now
