Interview: Emerald Fennell and Carey Mulligan offer a poison paradise in ‘Promising Young Woman’

In the new film and first feature from actress/writer/director Emerald Fennell, Promising Young Woman (out December 25 in theaters, VOD approximately three weeks later) tells a tale of candy-coated revenge when Cassie (Academy Award nominee Carey Mulligan) vows to avenge those who wronged a close friend. The film was co-produced by Margot Robbie and also stars Bo Burnham along with an ensemble cast that includes Laverne Cox, Alison Brie, Connie Britton, Jennifer Coolidge, Max Greenfield, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Chris Lowell, Sam Richardson, Molly Shannon, and Clancy Brown. 

I talked to Emerald Fennell and Carey Mulligan about the delicate nature of balancing the tone of a dark comedy like Promising Young Woman, some of Fennell’s influences on the film’s style and the unironic joy of “Stars Are Blind.”

Erik Anderson: Emerald, can tell me a little bit about the creation of the screenplay and how Margot Robbie’s lucky chap boarded it.

Emerald Fennell: I’ve been thinking about it for a while and started pitching it in spring/early summer of about 2017. And then I had a short film that I’d written and directed at Sundance in 2018 [Careful How You Go]. And when I did the lovely post-Sundance tour, I was pitching Promising Young Woman and, you know, I met so many people who were all wonderful, but Lucky Chap were just, they were just so great. There was just something about them, I knew I could trust them. I knew that they were good guys. I know that sounds very sort of facile and silly, but I, I just kind of put my faith in them and they were just amazing from the start. It was incredible. I think that was such a piece of luck, meeting those guys.

Carrie, how did you begin devising your plan for Cassie once you read the script?

Carey Mulligan: I was hugely informed by conversations with Emerald and particularly sort of visual references, the look and feel of her. And then where it was important to start from with Cassie, which is Nina, really, and who she was before all of this and what that relationship was. So you kind of have to understand what she’s lost to understand why she’s on the journey that she’s on. So we went back to the beginning with her, figured out what that relationship was and the events that happened that aren’t ever really kind of completely explained, that we needed to know kind of all of the details of, and then that sort of helped me to understand why she was the way she was and then it was really Emerald and I sort of talking it all out.

It’s funny, we see stories like this with men that are these anti-hero types and so rarely women, and in some ways this felt like the flip side to Drive where this time you’re Ryan Gosling.

CM: I always felt in Drive that I wanted to be in on the action. You know, that I was sort of stuck in the lift and I wanted to get out. So this is my version of getting out of the lift and getting in on the fun.

Exactly. What was the most daunting aspect of this role for you?

CM: Honestly, probably the comedic aspect. I think sort of the fact that I was surrounded by comedians and Cassie is funny and wry and sardonic, and I wanted to do that brilliant writing justice. I had done a play the year before that was sort of a monologue that was the first half of which was very funny and I’d sort of had to face my comic demons in that. But it was intimidating working opposite people like Bo Burnham and Jennifer Coolidge and people who are just so adept in that, no, not adept, adept is such an understatement. Geniuses! Geniuses at comedy. I guess that side of it, and also she’s a mammoth role and you just want to do parts like that justice; wanting to hit every mark as truthfully as I could. I just felt the sense of responsibility of playing her. She is just this iconic character and she is that way because she’s so intricately formed and the writing is so strong and you just don’t want to disappoint on any level. You just want it all to be. So it was just the task of that sort of felt intimidating.

Absolutely. I imagine so. Emerald, I think some of the shrewdest casting is the guys in the film because they all generally have these nice guy personas in other things that they’ve done. You kind of flip the script on them and the audience. Was that deliberate?

EF: Yeah, absolutely. And I think with the female characters just as much. Connie Britton and Alison Brie, they’re just such warmly regarded actresses that people, that we, feel very trusting towards, you know, and I think this is a movie about the gray areas and about nice people doing bad things. And so it really made sense to push the audience’s idea of what this stuff looks like and what the perpetrators look like. I think in the same way that Cassie isn’t what she seems. I think this film a lot of the time is sort of about that conflict between surface and what’s really going on. But it was wonderful to be able to just find these people that are so talented and really I was just asking them to do what they normally do, which is be delightful and charming. It’s just that on this day, while they’re being delightful and charming, someone’s going to come and tell them that they’re not delightful or charming. That’s such an interesting moment to see that kind of that punctured.

I think it’s exactly right. At first it seems like everybody’s cast a little bit against type, but they’re actually playing the exact same thing just in a totally very different story. Speaking of tone, did you have some like touchstones that you wanted to pull from because for me there’s like a little bit of To Die For, a little bit of American Psycho. I just wondered if there was something that you personally were pulling from.

EM: (laughs) YES! I’m glad you said that, because those really are two of the films that I was touching on a lot. I was really touching on those films a lot. I think Fargo was another one, the Coen Brothers are just brilliant with that kind of bluntness; their approach to violence and the way that they show things, huge things are treated with complete disregard. And then the tiniest minutia is examined in meticulous detail. Someone like Sofia Coppola too, who I think is very sort of sly, she’s very clever. She’s very brilliant at making things inviting and then pulling the rug out. I suppose I just wanted it to be like the movies that I love that are funny and thrilling and gripping, but also you can’t stop thinking about. Midsommar. I mean, that one I saw that after we were like, what a film, what an astonishing piece of work to make something so harrowing so beautiful. It’s just astonishing.

Totally, and to be able to really mine the dark comedy of it, which I think this does too.

EF: (laughs) I went to watch it at the Grove though and I was the only person laughing often people’s heads were turning, sort of shocked.

There’s some Robert De Niro in Cape Fear for you there.

EF: Right?

I think the film’s greatest strengths, and I keep hearing this from people that I talk to, is the music selection in the film. I knew immediately I was going to love this as soon as “Boys” started playing.

EF: (laughs)

CM: (laughs)

I’m like, okay, here we go. I’m all in already. And the totally unironic “Stars Are Blind” sequence and everything all the way up to “Toxic.” Tell me a little bit about how the music helped shape the film.

EF: Certainly for me, it’s just one of the biggest things. The way I write is, I just have a playlist that I will play over and over and over again, and I will walk around and think, and the script will get written in my head over the course of months, sometimes years. And then when it’s ready, I’ll write it down and that’s usually pretty much it. So for me, the music is kind of the starting point. And then with this film, as you say, unironic, I think it’s very important at word and thank you for saying it. I think we have a very skewed idea of what merits plaudits and what doesn’t, and what’s serious and what isn’t, what’s important and what isn’t. I think all of these things, Britney Spears is very important to me. My nails are important to me, but I hope that doesn’t mean that I’m not a serious person in some ways, and that I couldn’t murder someone if I felt like it. (all laughing) I think the thing about “Boys” and the opening sequence is that it was about establishing early on to the audience that they could laugh, that this was in going to be darkly funny and the lyrics just were really so in there so early on, it’s just, “I was busy thinking about boys” and I was when I was writing it. (Carey laughs)

Carey, what was your take from the music and did it help you at all?

CM: Oh yeah, hugely. I mean, it was really when Emerald sent over the playlist that it just sort of expanded my idea of what this film was, and the wit that was behind it. And the brightness and the fun, you know, that this wasn’t, and Emerald said this to me in a meeting, the first meeting we had, she said, “This is not a film about a woman in a gray cardigan sort of crying and staring out the window.” This is going to be inviting and will want to draw you in and part of that is this music. I still have Emerald’s playlist on my phone. When I got to LA, I went out a week before my family to set up a house for us and do costume fittings and stuff. I was driving around LA with my windows down, playing the playlist because it was just so brilliant. So I do think it’s a huge part of feelings of warmth and lightness when you come into a film, but also that it’s going to go to dark places, but also is very, very funny and warm. There is real love in the film.

Absolutely. Speaking of costumes in, at the end with Cassie and the nurse’s outfit, it almost feels like a little bit of a nod to Villanelle [from Killing Eve]. Am I crazy?

EF: I think it was, it certainly wasn’t a deliberate nod. I think the film was I handed the film in before, I don’t know, it was all sort of a muddle at the same time, but I think certainly one of the things that I loved so much about Killing Eve was its preoccupation with clothes and what clothes mean to women. I think that’s something that will always be something I’m really interested in; how we use them to kind of subvert expectations and conceal things about ourselves. So I think that will always be a part of things that I do, but I think it’s just a happy coincidence.

I don’t want to delve too much into spoiler territory, but I wanted to ask about Cassie’s notebook of “conquests,” where she has a different color pen ink for each one. And are we kind of just left to our own devices as to what each of those represent?

EF: I’m afraid so! I mean, I know, but I’ll never tell. The great thing about a movie in general and having this confined space to tell a story, it’s that what you leave out is as important as what you put in. And I think that with this movie, what you leave out is very important. I think even Cassie sometimes doesn’t know what she’s capable of.

Well, I want to thank both of you so much for chatting with me today.

EF: Thank you so much.

CM: Thank you.

I wish you both the best for the movie. I love that it’s coming out on Christmas Day.

(All laughing)

Talk about irony. I love it. Have a wonderful day and enjoy your premiere next week.

EF: Oh, goodness. Thank you.

CM: Thank you!

Focus Features will release Promising Young Woman in select theaters on December 25 then streaming and On Demand approximately three weeks later.