In Reunited, Awards Insider hosts a conversation between two Oscar contenders who have collaborated on a previous project. Here, we speak with She Said star Carey Mulligan and The Fabelmans actor Paul Dano, who previously worked together on Wildlife, directed by Dano and starring Mulligan.

During their Reunited conversation, Paul Dano and Carey Mulligan both point out that the other one is considered a “serious actor.” With résumés full of acclaimed dramatic work onstage and onscreen, including their recent films The Fabelmans and She Said, they make a good point. 

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But in person, the pair are silly together, laughing freely in the way you’d expect from old, old friends. They first met in 2008, when Mulligan was appearing on Broadway in The Seagull. She became fast friends with her costar Zoe Kazan, who was dating Dano. (They now have two children together.) Over the years, their friendship grew, and almost a decade later, Dano cast Mulligan in his directorial debut, Wildlife, alongside his costar in Prisoners, Jake Gyllenhaal. 

Though they started out in this business very young—Dano was around 10, while Mulligan started right out of high school—they both say that it’s been the process of becoming grown-ups and parents (Mulligan has two children with husband Marcus Mumford and Dano recently had his second child with Kazan) that’s allowed them to finally feel secure in their work. 

Here, the pair reveal how they captured the real people they play in The Fabelmans and She Said, how they’ve evolved into playing parents, and the “sloppy” and sporty projects that would like to do in the future. 

Vanity Fair: You’re good friends now, but what do you remember about the first time you met?

Paul Dano: I remember seeing The Seagull on Broadway, probably in a preview, maybe a dress rehearsal. And I remember thinking that you were very good. But I had heard Zoe talk about you already. So, we must have met then, right? Or was there—

Carey Mulligan: —a time beforehand? No, we didn’t meet before then. I remember you coming to see the play. I just have a really clear picture of us in a restaurant afterwards and we were waiting to go to a table and you and Zoe were standing next to each other and you were so sweet. I mean you as a couple, you obviously singularly very sweet, but the two of you were so sweet. 

Dano: I remember some after-theater hangs, whatever. And you guys became close pretty quick. 

Mulligan: Because we were sharing a dressing room. And then we were in New York together. What were you doing when we were doing the play?

Dano: I don’t recall. I may not have, I may have just been like being a person.

Let’s jump to Wildlife. How did the two of you end up teaming on that?

Dano: I wanted to make a film for a long time. I read this book by Richard Ford called Wildlife. I started adapting it. Zoe is a proper writer, so I needed her help at a certain point. That was my first time trying to write. But at the time that I started writing it, you would’ve been way too young. Luckily, it just took many years to write. 

Mulligan: When did you start writing it?

Dano: Probably at least four years before we made it, but on and off. So I would use it to not act too much. I’d be like, “okay, I’m gonna take a break and try to make this my day job.” I started writing it in the hotel room when we were shooting Prisoners actually, and hanging out with Jake [Gyllenhaal]. So both you guys would’ve been too young at that point. And then the script was ready, and you must have been the first person we asked because I don’t think we talked about Jake until after I remember calling you. I was really nervous because it’s a friend and I think it’s too much to ask for favors in the acting department, frankly. It’s a lot of work. You have to travel away from your family. But because we knew you, I just remember really feeling like, “I hope Carey doesn’t feel that way. I hope she’ll only do it if she actually wants to.”

Mulligan: I remember literally being like, “Oh, my God, Paul thinks I can act!” [Laughs.] Because Paul’s an incredible actor and I always felt really that you were in this different echelon. And then when you offered it to me, I was like, “he must think that I can do it to be able to ask to do it.” I obviously wanted to do it from the second I read it. It was so incredible. And then I was like, but she has a 14 year old. I feel like maybe I’m a bit young? 

Dano: No, that’s true. You were young. But for that time period, it  worked if she was like 19 [when she had the baby].

Mulligan: Totally. I’d played mothers before of smaller children, but this was the first time I was being the mother of a teenager.

Dano: Definitely different. Me too, with The Fabelmans. When I picked up Gabriel LaBelle to hang out with him for the first time, I was sitting in the car and I looked over and I was like, “this is my kid?” I mean, if we’re being honest, he had more facial hair than I do [Laughs]. I think when you start young enough—

Mulligan: You’re so used to being the youngest on set. 

Dano: I actually think it’s a really important transition in life and in your art that you know how to sort of grow into yourself as an adult. And that’s still coming.

The Fabelmans and She Said both required you to play characters inspired by real people. Carey, what did you have to pull from Megan to really get what you needed from her and Paul, how did you get Steven to share about his father and how difficult that?

Dano: It’s funny because we’re both playing people who are real that the audience doesn’t necessarily know. So, that’s a little bit different than if you were asked to play John Lennon or whoever. I’m assuming you were living in London at the time. Where did you start with She Said?

Mulligan: The script gave us so many indications of what kind of film it wanted to be in that [screenwriter] Rebecca [Lenkiewicz] had made all these really concrete decisions that were part of the screenplay, which was you never see Weinstein’s face, you never see depictions of violence against women, the survivors tell the story of themselves. We were just like, “oh, we have to be as real—we have to be these people as much as we can.” But we were also really clear that to do that, actually an imitation of that person is probably the last thing you should think about doing. But with her, the postnatal depression was something that I had with my daughter. So we talked a lot about that. 

Dano: I thought the postpartum stuff was handled so beautifully in the film, and I love how motherhood was incorporated into it as well. And those women and the way you’re describing that mindset, they’re so strong, ballsy. I don’t wanna use the word warrior, but to pound the pavement, so to speak, to ask those questions and to be fearless really. 

Mulligan: You see the journalists who are really seasoned and sort of built like that. They did get the death threats. They said they never felt unsafe, but it was a very uncertain time. They also had The New York Times behind them. But the women who came forward were not from a profession where they necessarily had the sort of armor of being trained to deal with this stuff. They were prepared to put everything on the line. They had no idea what they were gonna have to face as a result of speaking out. And they did it anyway. The whole thing is just a sort of huge testament to that courage. 

Dano: I have a question that I don’t know if you’re going to like. How has your approach and process of preparation and relationship to your work changed over that span of time? Because it’s been quite some time now that we’ve known each other. 

Mulligan: The Seagull was the first time I sort of had a plan. You started much younger than me—how old were you when you started?

Dano: Young.

Mulligan: So I was 18, but the first job I went on was Pride & Prejudice. And it was like a group of young people under the age of 25. And we all just sort of ran around country estates.

Dano: That sounds great. Just parties.

Mulligan: Yeah, and staying in nice hotels. It was so great. Then I went straight from that to a play at the Royal Court Theater where I played this sort of lytic 14-year-old who’s sexually assaulted. And it was a real crash down to earth in a totally different experience. But I still was sort of winging it. And I remember them all warming up onstage and they were all trained. The whole cast was filled with these incredible theater actors. And I had never done a play. I wouldn’t come out of my dressing room to warm up. And I remember the director coming and taking me by the hand and sort of dragging me down to warm up. So for years I was like, “I’m not really an actor. I don’t really know what I’m doing.” My family aren’t in this world. My brother used to be in the Army and it’s always felt a bit sort of silly that I was like, “well, I just like pretending.” And I think as I’ve gotten older and less insecure, I’ve been like, “no, it’s, it’s a job.” 

Dano: So funny. I would not have known that because The Seagull is quite a serious piece of work. I think a lot of your work is serious. 

Mulligan: And for you, Steven Spielberg is basically the reason I became an actor with the films that he made, but to be asked to play his father must have been the most enormous compliment. But secondly, completely terrifying.

Dano: I told him the last night of filming, it would still take me a few years to fully let it in.

Mulligan: Had you ever done anything with him before? 

Dano: No, no. I got a text that Steven wanted to meet and we Zoomed. And it took a while, but on the third Zoom, he had cigar, which he doesn’t light, but it was his mouth. 

Mulligan: He doesn’t light it. It’s just there. 

Dano: It’s like a thinking thing. [He said,] “I think you’ll make my dad proud.” It was the Zoom to say, “I want you to do this.” We just started Zooming maybe once a week, and every week we got closer. Steven, he’s one of the great film artists of all time, and to see him, somebody who most of us revere in some way, shape or form, be that sort of open and vulnerable and emotional at 74 years old, I think at the time it was very powerful just to talk with him about his life and his family.

Mulligan: And his father had—

Dano: —passed away. Burt’s final scene in the film we shot on the one year anniversary of Arnold’s passing. So it’s a story he wanted to tell for a long time, but I think it came out rather quickly after Arnold’s passing. I did feel it was kind of a heavy cloak to bear because of his relationship with his father, it was not bad, but there was tension. I think when his parents split, often one parent gets more of the blame. And I think not all the kids blame the same parent. They didn’t speak for a long time and then they became close again. But I remember feeling like, “Paul wants to give Steven a hug.” I wanted to be there for him. But I think Bert doesn’t quite always know how to do that. I remember this like push and pull the first few days being like, I'm here for Bert. 

Mulligan: Steven, he was wearing a mask right? [The Fabelmans was filmed under strict COVID production guidelines.]

Dano: He was wearing a mask. He often had sunglasses. It’s funny because Seth Rogan felt the opposite. He was like, “I can’t see him so I’m not worried,” where I was the opposite. Whenever he took off his sunglasses and mask and I could see his sweet face and his eyes, I was like, “oh yeah, he’s happy. Or he’s having a huge emotion, you know?” But with the mask on sometimes, those first few days, I couldn’t tell. 

You both started out very young. Where did that conviction come from that you could succeed as actors?

Dano: If you didn’t go to drama school, what happened right after high school?

Mulligan: I tried to get into drama school and I didn’t get in anywhere. In England you have six places you can apply to and then you are done for the year. And I used them all on drama schools and not on any universities. And I didn’t get into any of them and I did it all without telling my parents because I was convinced that I would get in and then I’d be able to say, “hey, I got in!” And I didn’t. So I had to say, “I didn’t get in. I’m now gonna have to live at home for a bit.” So I was working in a pub, two pubs, and I was a runner at film studio during the day and I just started writing letters. I had met Julian Fellowes who wrote Gosford Park. He had come to my school to give a talk and he’s the only actor I’d ever met in my life. So I wrote to him. I knew my parents were going to insist that I go to university at that point because I had really had fucked it all up. I was heading that way and I knew I would drop out almost immediately because I just didn’t want to go to university. I wanted to work. Clearly, like 19 people had written him similar letters, writers and directors and actors who were all my age. So he and his wife took all of us out for one dinner to give us collective advice. So in that, I started going to this workshop in London, and then also at the same time they said they're doing this big open casting search for Pride and Prejudice to find kids. And I looked really young back then. So I auditioned for that and that was my first job.

Dano: I was kind of almost the opposite, which is I started acting young.

Mulligan: How young?

Dano: I think I did my first Broadway play when I was like 10 or 11. I did some musicals.

Mulligan: Did you? Can you sing?

Dano: I can sing a little bit. I think singing is one of the things that got me to acting probably as a kid. I did my first film when I was 16 called L.I.E.and that’s the moment where I realized I wanted to be an actor. The year L.I.E. came out, In the Bedroom, Ghost World, Memento, there was just a bunch of really great independent films. And I didn’t watch independent films at that point. I think Terminator 2 was probably my favorite movie. So films started to make more sense to me after L.I.E. But I really wanted to go to college because I think having been a child actor, I had a very stiff arm up to like going too fast. I was deeply insecure. It sounds like a confident choice, but it was a self-defense choice. It wasn’t confidence. So I made sure to go to college. And then I had a very silly moment where I was at my desk doing homework and I was like, “I think I have to try to be an actor.” I still find every three to five years, I have to recommit myself to if I can still do this and am I still gonna keep learning and pushing because otherwise I get mad at myself.

Mulligan: In those brief moments, what’s the alternate?

Dano: Oh, you know, those things that are never going to happen, which I’m really not cut out for, like I’ll go live on a farm. I would like to spend more time writing. I really want to make another film. 

How is the point you’re both at now in your careers, and since you both now have families, influencing your career choices?

Dano: First of all, becoming a parent has changed everything. The Fabelmans, frankly, was the first time that I’ve really used so much of my present life, so to speak. It was about marriage. It was about being a father. When I do The Batman, that part of me is not coming to work in the same way. So, it felt transitional almost. I was like I’m stepping into my adult self even further somehow through this character and through this film. In a weird way, it makes it harder. It’s harder to go away. It’s harder to ask your family to go away on location. It’s harder to prepare. It's harder to come home after work, but I also think that I feel like my priorities just keep becoming clearer. 

Mulligan: I think it also changes as they get older. It’s different now. When they’re tiny, they are sort of portable. Now mine are getting a bit older, it will become clearer what is and isn’t possible for us. But I think in terms of the work, I feel a lot more relaxed. It’s that old cliché—the acting you do for free and everything else is what you get paid for. I’m so lucky, we're both so lucky that at the moment we get to do jobs because we want to do them, not because we have to. And that’s such a luxury in life and in the world to be able to do that. I think it’s sort of very obvious when it’s the right time to do something and not, whereas I think I probably debated more in the past. I feel very cut and dry.

Since you’re friends in real life, can you share something surprising about each other?

Mulligan: For a long time Zoe and I would hang a lot and it was not like the three of us. Like even at my wedding, Zoe was there all week and you came for the weekend. I think for a while I was so intimidated by you as an actor, from There Will Be Blood. It was so otherworldly and incredible. I think for a while I was like, “Ugh, he’s a proper one.” And, and then after a while I was like, “oh, he’s so goofy.” I don’t know if that’s the perception of serious actors, and I think you are perceived as a serious actor. 

Dano: But I’m just like a silly person. Yeah, I don’t know why. It’s hard, this part of what we do is weird, right? I do think that I have to save some part of myself for me in my real life, so to speak. Because I think it’s important to separate them actually. When you’re there for work, I do think the character is guiding you. And then when we come to do this, I have to have some sense of separation. I don’t know why. 

What sort of project would you love to see the other person do in the future?

Dano: I can’t wait to see you in a play again someday because I think you’re so brilliant on stage. 

Mulligan: I’d like seeing you on stage, which is impossible to think about when you’ve got little ones because you miss bedtime every night. Unless you could do a play at sort of three in the afternoon every day. 

Dano: I think after Promising Young Woman, maybe something that continues in — that film is quite heavy in one way — but I think something maybe loose and a little funny.

Mulligan: I want to, I really want to.

Dano: Some scene where you’re like drunk and not supposed to be. Something a little sloppy, maybe.

Mulligan: Yeah, you get to do slightly less heavy press when you’re doing a [comedy]. Like people doing press for Marvel movies or whatever and I’m like, “Oh, that’s so nice.” We have to talk about serious things.