Carey Mulligan on My Fair Lady, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and All Her Rumored Projects

When you're an in-demand star, the rumor mill can churn dramatically about what upcoming movies you're planning to star in. Leave it to Movieline, then, to go in and help actors clean up their IMDb profiles, separating fact from fiction.

Today's happy-to-oblige star is Carey Mulligan, who's riding high off of her Academy Award nomination for An Education and her new drama The Greatest, out April 2. Mulligan has press duties for Wall Street 2 and Never Let Me Go in the fall, but in the meantime, she'd like to sneak in another film. Will it be John Madden's remake of My Fair Lady? How about Effie, an Emma Thompson-scripted biopic about artist John Ruskin (to be played by Thompson's husband, Greg Wise) and his short-lived marriage to Effie Gray? And hey, aren't there rumors that Mulligan might play the lead in David Fincher's adaptation of the white-hot novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Movieline put all these potential projects to Mulligan for her clarification.

All right, Carey. I wanted to ask you about some upcoming projects -- or, at least, some rumored ones.

Uh-huh.

Emma Thompson was on a red carpet yesterday talking about the remake of My Fair Lady that she's written, and she said, "I think Carey is set to play it."

Well, that's nice. [Laughs]

Are you?

Well, that's hugely flattering. That would be great. I really don't know, at this point, what's happening with that. That's lovely that Emma said that, that's really nice, but honestly, I don't know.

Are you concerned about doing My Fair Lady because it's so strongly identified with Audrey Hepburn -- and you yourself were compared to her so often when you did An Education?

I don't know. Remakes are a difficult thing because some people feel protective of the original. I'm not speaking in terms of me playing the character, but in general, that role is so loved with her. But you know, there are stage revivals constantly of Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, Cabaret...and you see other people play these same parts. They're constantly changing casts. It's different -- when you do a play, nobody seems to mind a revival. I mean, The Seagull's been done countless amounts of times, and we did that on Broadway and people still embraced it. I don't know, I suppose if you can do it decently well, you can get away with it. [Laughs] Just don't go and be crap, basically!

What about Effie?

I actually don't know what's happening with that. I read that script about two years ago, and that's another sort of difficult, independent British film. It's hard to get made. I don't know if that film's going, but yeah, I was attached to that.

OK, next rumored project!

Oh God! All these things that I'm not in!

There's been chatter that you might star in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for David Fincher.

I would LOVE to do that. I'm not even gonna lie! I would love...not that I was lying before, but yeah, I would love to do that. That would be insane. I'm obsessed with those books, as everyone else is, but no, I haven't had a phone call. That would be awesome, I would love to play that part, but that hasn't come to me.

Is that where you are right now, figuring out your next big movie?

Yeah.

And reading blogs and wondering to yourself, "Wait, they say I'm doing this movie?"

I'd love to read a blog saying I'm gonna be in [The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo]! Yeah, I just haven't found the right thing yet, I don't think, since all of this stuff's been finished. I have a couple of different films coming out at the end of the year, so I'd like to do a job before I promote something else. I don't want to be just constantly talking about myself. [Laughs] It would be more fun to do some work, but the right thing hasn't come along. I would like to do a play, but I can't find the right thing. I don't need to do a starring role, I just want to play a really interesting character. I'm just taking a minute to figure out what it is.

[Photo Credit: Steve Granitz/Getty Images]