The actress and Met Ball co-chair, has put her silver and gold metal paillette dress up for sale on eBay, with a starting bid of $500.

Of course, Mulligan isn’t getting rid of the frock to make a quick buck–100% of the proceeds from the sale will benefit Oxfam, an international relief and development organization that creates lasting solutions to poverty, hunger, and injustice. In other words, you’ll be getting a show-stopping Prada dress and the satisfaction of knowing your purchase is helping to make the world a better place.

The dress went up for auction late last night and will be on the bidding block until May 19. So far there are six bids, hiking the price of the gown up to $1000–which is still, you know, not that bad for a one-of-a-kind Prada dress. And like we said: It’s for charity!

So if you’r a European size 38-40 (that’s a US 2-4), we suggest you put your bid in now. No telling, how high the stakes will get.

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Rooney Mara is in final negotiations to join Spike Jonze’s upcoming project now that Carey Mulligan has fallen out due to scheduling conflicts.

Untitled project stars Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams and Samantha Morton. Jonze penned the script and is set to direct the pic about a man who falls in love with the voice of a computer. Details of Mara’s role are unclear.

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The question is: who plays Nora? Deadline says there is a shortlist that will begin to meet with Warner Bros. next week. Names on the list include Eva Green, Amy Adams, Emma Stone, Carey Mulligan, Rachel Weisz, Kristen Wiig, Emily Blunt and Isla Fisher. That is, just about every smart actress with free time in her schedule and an interest in starring opposite one of the few semi-legit movie stars in the business. And without knowing more about what Marshall, Depp and WB are specifically looking for, it seems pointless to try to play the guessing game based on a list that long.

The original The Thin Man, released in 1934, spawned a series of comic detective films and, later, even a TV show, and that precedent is fueling fire that the material might become a hit once again.

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The actors – along with American Vogue editor Anna Wintour, The Wire‘s Idris Elba, Downton Abbey’s Elizabeth McGovern and movie mogul Harvey Weinstein – were at the glitzy event held by US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle in honour of David Cameron and wife Samantha.

English folk-rock band Mumford & Sons – a favourite of Mrs Cameron – and US R&B star John Legend provided entertainment, while produce from the White House’s own kitchen gardens was used in the winter harvest-themed meal.

Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson, Olympic gold medallist Denise Lewis and golf star Rory McIlroy were also on the guest list, along with politicians George Osborne and William Hague.

The US President praised the Camerons for their “strength” as parents as he toasted them at the dinner, held in a marquee on the South Lawn.

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When Carey Mulligan was working on her latest film, Shame, she saw a documentary about the Woodman family and Francesca’s work inspired her character Sissy – a damaged, needy, tinnily upbeat young woman, whose singing act becomes her last desperate attempt to forge a relationship with her brother. When she is working on a film, says Mulligan, she often makes scrapbooks for her character. “It really is so childish. It’s like my way of saying,” – she puts on a child’s voice – “‘I’m qualified!’ … I had little Woodman pictures in the book, stuff like that.” Her voice goes quiet. “If anyone ever read them I’d be mortified because they’re just full of shit. They’re not clever and there’s nothing creative in them. It’s just me reassuring myself.”

Mulligan’s conversation veers between supreme confidence – her willingness to argue openly, straightforwardly, to secure the jobs she wants – and serious self-effacement. When I look at Woodman’s photographs after the interview, they remind me of Mulligan, not in their angst (the photographer killed herself at 22), but in their depiction of a young woman suspended in an odd, disconcerting moment. In Mulligan’s case, this began with the release of her 2009 film An Education – one of her first leading roles – and continued through her 2010 Oscar nomination for best actress. She went overnight from normal life to 50ft-billboard fame. And although she appreciates her circumstances, she still seems to be absorbing them. “Sometimes it’s so weird just to do an interview,” she says. “This morning I was back in my parents’ house, with my brother, and we went for a jog together, then had breakfast as a family. And a couple of hours later I’m wearing high heels and a dress and makeup, and talking about my job. It’s such a strange reality – and a wonderful one.”

We meet a few days after a screening of Shame, a dark, powerful film by the artist and director Steve McQueen, starring Michael Fassbender as Brandon, a young professional living in New York who is addicted to sex. The film strips the subject of prurience, so it becomes like any addiction – an action that has moved from habit to horror; never pleasurable, always functional; a repetitive reaction to grief. There are clues to Brandon’s unhappiness in his relationship with Mulligan’s character Sissy, who turns up unexpectedly at his flat. “We’re not bad people,” she reassures him in the film’s most direct line. “We just come from a bad place.”

Mulligan was desperate for the role, and says she agreed with McQueen when he told her: “You’re good, but if you’re going to do this you’re going to have to be 16 times better.” Their first interview to discuss her taking the part didn’t start well. “He tried to leave about 10 minutes in,” she says, “when I was there to basically beg for the job, an audition, whatever. He was like,” – she half stands, holding out an arm to leave – “‘All right, nice to meet you,’ and I was like, ‘WOAH! Wo, wo, wo – what are you doing?’ So I convinced him to sit down again, and he started asking why I wanted the part, and I basically said I just hadn’t found a film role comparable to how I felt when I was playing Nina in The Seagull.” Mulligan played the ambitious, troubled Nina to enormous acclaim at the Royal Court in 2007, before transferring to Broadway. “And when I read this script I thought, it’s not the same person, but I hadn’t found that sort of fear in anything for a while … So I said: ‘This is exactly the kind of film I want to be making. I don’t want to be making big, silly films.’ And then – Oh God, I was really trying to get the job – I started reciting Chekhov. I started going,” – she babbles these words: “‘I know now, I understand, it’s not about fame or glory, all the things I used to dream about, it’s the ability to endure, to bear your cross, to keep the faith, I do have faith, and when I think about my vocation, I’m not afraid of life.’ And he said: ‘That’s right! You’re an artist!’ And I said, ‘I know!’

“He got me so riled up I said: ‘In fact, I want to get a tattoo of that just to remind myself.’ And he said: ‘You get the tattoo, you get the job.’ The next day I did, and he gave me the job that afternoon.” I ask to see the tattoo, and she holds out her right wrist. Inside is a small, delicate outline of a seagull. “But, and this is awful, I thought, I can’t walk into a Soho tattoo parlour, because I’m so ridiculously middle class, and not cool, so I need a place where I can go and not feel like a total idiot. And it was Selfridges. And actually I felt like more of an idiot there.”

She leans forward on the sofa, touching her toes, as she does often in the interview. It is at odds with her elegant black dress, but fits her age – she’s 26 – and friendly demeanour.

The first time we see Sissy is when she’s confronted in the shower by Brandon; she doesn’t grab a towel, but stands there naked, talking. Through the film they argue and bicker, the tension rising. In one of the most striking scenes, she performs a slowed-down, stripped-back version of New York – New York in a bar; a sad, psychological hymn to where their lives have brought them. Sissy’s arms are streaked with scars, and while Mulligan did some online research into people who self-harm, she says she didn’t talk to anyone in person, because “I don’t think you should ever damage other people for your art.” When she started out in acting, she always tried to draw on her own experiences, but stopped when she appeared as Nina, “who runs away to Moscow, has a child and loses the baby, all of that. I was working with Ian Rickson, and he taught me to invent in a way I hadn’t been. With Sissy, I could never draw from my life.” Because she hasn’t had those experiences? “No! Thank the lord.”

She found every aspect of the role daunting, because Sissy is “such an exhibitionist, such an extrovert. I tend to clamp up on camera, but this meant working with no inhibitions. I mean, I don’t wear a bikini on the beach. I walk around my house in pyjamas. I haven’t seen myself naked in the mirror for probably a decade. I’m very prudish.”

So her family doesn’t walk around naked? “No, no, no, no, no, no,” she says. “I would scream if I saw any of my family naked, and vice versa.” But the way the film was shot made her feel comfortable. Before filming started, she was living in New York, and “hanging out with friends. And when I got the job I just felt that she wasn’t someone who works out. I was living it up, eating what I liked. I accepted I wasn’t trying to look great, and that was the reason I felt so comfortable, because the way it was shot meant [the nudity] was anatomical, not sexual.” When her best friend saw the film, she says, he told her the character was like her “in extremis, at my absolute worst … My best friend has seen me horribly drunk before, and I’m sure I’ve behaved badly in front of him, and she was me if I had none of these good people around me, and had gone down the wrong track. Obviously I hope I’d never end up like her, because she doesn’t have any boundaries. Whereas I’m more the sort of person who doesn’t like hugging strangers because we don’t know each other, so we shouldn’t.” What about kissing on each cheek? “I always fuck it up. I just like a good old handshake.”

Mulligan grew up in hotels; her father was a highly successful hotel manager, and she was born in Mayfair, before moving with her parents and older brother to Hyde Park Corner, then on to Hanover in Germany, and Düsseldorf. She wanted to be an actor since she was small, and her first ambition was to appear in musicals. “Then I realised, at 14, that you have to be able to sing really loudly, and really well, and I can’t dance to save my life.”

While studying for her A-levels at Woldingham, a private school for girls, she applied for drama school in secret. Her parents had said she should go to university first. She was outraged, so put down three drama schools on her UCAS form. There was a “movie story in my head”, she says, that “against all the odds I’d get in, and I’d be like,” – she crows in mock-triumph – “‘Ha, Mum and Dad – look! My talent has been recognised! You must recognise it too!’” All the drama schools rejected her. Did she consider giving up? “No. I just knew I had to try to do it.” The experience didn’t dent her confidence, she says, “because I didn’t think I was very good. I just imagined that I could be good, or would like to be.”

The screenwriter Julian Fellowes had given a talk at her school, and so she contacted him, explaining how much she wanted to act. He and his wife helped her get an audition for a film version of Pride and Prejudice, she won the part and was soon appearing at the Royal Court, and in Bleak House, then as Jenny in An Education. Playing a 16-year-old in a stifling suburban home in the early 60s, trying to escape through a relationship with a seductive, secretive older man, Mulligan caught the knowingness and vulnerability of her character perfectly – her excitement at moving up and away from her parents’ stultifying world, and the wrench of that too. Her pixie-ish features won comparisons with Audrey Hepburn, while the slight downward slope of her eyes conveyed muted sadness.

She had expected the film to be shown in small arthouse cinemas, had no idea it would even be distributed in the US, so when her Oscar nomination was announced she was shocked. “I was like a rabbit in the headlights, and went through the whole awards season hiding behind Colin Firth,” who was nominated for best actor for A Single Man. The two actors share a publicist, and they would go to events together, “and I’d be like,” – she clenches her teeth – “‘I don’t want to meet anyone famous,’ and he’d say: ‘You don’t have to.’ Him and his wife looked after me.

“We went to a party once, full of industry people, and went into the corner and were basically the only two British people there. We created a circle of hostility, so no one would try and talk to us, and we didn’t have to talk to anyone. There were five of us, all cowering, and we drank our wine, and would occasionally stare out intimidatingly, to keep people away. Not because people were clawing to talk to me,” she adds quickly, “although they were probably clawing to talk to Colin – but it’s very strange. I felt like the person who had accidentally been invited to the party.”

She won’t talk about her private life – when I ask whether she’s engaged to the musician Marcus Mumford, as has been reported, she says: “I’m not going to answer that!” and then mock-screams and says she finds it odd being written about. “I really try not to read anything [online], and then occasionally I will be completely self-destructive, once every six months, and it’s really horrible. Sometimes people write the most ghastly things, and it makes you feel like crap … A while ago I read some stuff, and it was tonnes of people, all saying I wasn’t beautiful enough to be an actress. And I thought, well,” she sounds crestfallen, “that’s not what you’re meant to be. I’ve never aspired to play a character that was beautiful.”

The closest exception, she admits, is the wealthy, rarefied Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby – a role she’s been filming in Sydney with co-star Leonardo DiCaprio and director Baz Luhrmann. She was at an event when she found out she’d landed the role; Luhrmann’s wife, Catherine Martin, was there, handed her the phone, and, “It was Baz,” says Mulligan, “and he was going,” she puts on a deep Australian accent, “‘Hello Daisy’. And I was crying, and people were milling around, and I was sobbing and couldn’t talk.” She says she’s been freaking out every day of filming, because “it’s so tricky to make sure she doesn’t become one-noted, or too emotional. I’m balancing it all, and terrified of messing it up.”

The role looks likely to push her to another level of fame, into another strange bubble. Does she want to disappear into her roles? “I can walk down the street and nobody ever recognises me,” she says, “so I’m pleased to be in that category of disappearing into things. Sometimes someone will come up and say, ‘Are you Auntie Suzie’s girl?’ because they think I’m related to them. And I can just say no, and walk away.”

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Carey Mulligan, Anna Wintour, and Miuccia Prada will co-host the 2012 event, which will take place on May 7.

The committee will be rounded out by Great Gatsby director Baz Luhrmann as Exhibition Creative Consultant, and Nathan Crowley as Production Designer.

Your character in Shame, Sissy, is another fantastic and really interesting part…

Yes. My agent gave me the script. She read it and she told me that there is this insane part of Michael Fassbender’s sister and I read it and I thought, ‘No way on earth will Steve McQueen ever let me play this.’ I thought they would cast someone gritty and American. So I met Steve thinking that there was no way this would come off and he kept on trying to leave! Like ten minutes into our meeting, he was like, ‘Right, okay, thanks.’ And I was, ‘Oh, no!’ And I kept making him sit down again.

What did you say to him?

I just said, ‘Look, Steve, the thing is’, and then I wouldn’t have anything to say. But we did end up talking about The Seagull, which is my big obsession. Playing Nina in The Seagull, I have never really recovered from it and I want to play Nina for the rest of my life, but I couldn’t find a film role that was on the same level, or as difficult or as interesting. Then when I read Shame I thought it was as difficult as Nina and that is what I told him, to convince him to let me do it.

Why is Sissy so close to Nina in The Seagull?

They both have an uncompromising nature. Both of them have the ability to jump without a safety net and they both have really, really high standards for love and for success and yet neither of them can meet them. There is a tragedy in that. When we were rehearsing for Shame, Steve and I talked a lot about Francesca Woodman who was an artist. She was a photographer, an American from Connecticut, and she started taking photographs when she was 15 years old. The majority of them were self-portraits and nudes and she killed herself; she jumped out of a building when she was 22 years old in 1981. I don’t know what it was about her but she had this same thing. She wasn’t afraid. She had no boundaries. She wouldn’t accept less than taking over and being seen and being heard. I don’t know why she killed herself but one of her frustrations was that she was not accepted in her time. People didn’t really appreciate her work and now, of course, her work is sold for thousands.

Tell me how Sissy fits into Shame…

I think Shame is about a man who is trying to control his life and won’t allow people to become intimate with him. He is trying to forget and has a regimented life and part of that is an addiction, his relationship with his sister and the people around him. But the sexual addiction has always been a side note to me, because I think it is more about how he connects with people and how any obsession or addiction informs how you behave towards the people around you. The sexual thing is obviously very specific and it is uncomfortable. I think that is Steve’s intention. It is funny because in the cinema if you make light of sex, or you are crude or you make a joke of it, then it’s fine and acceptable. But the minute you start to talk about it seriously it is unattractive and there is nothing in Shame that is very sexy. It makes you go away and never want to have sex again!

It must have been an intimidating role?

Terrifying. If I had been playing any kind of character, playing a tea lady, I would have been scared, because it was Steve McQueen and Michael Fassbender. The standards that they set are so high, so that in itself was terrifying. Added to that the particulars about the character, the music and the singing and all that stuff, it was a pretty big leap.

It’s an intense film, but can you also have a laugh when making the movie?

You can. I didn’t know what to expect because my first meeting with Steve was quite intense. He sort of riles you up. I almost cried! I think I did cry at our first meeting because he stirs up a desire to make art and no one else ever has ever done that in the same way. He really challenges you on why you make the choices that you make — what kind of films you make and why you are doing them. And that was really intimidating and alarming but he also reminds you why you want to act. He would come in when we were doing a take and he’d say, ‘Ah, Michael, you two seem like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’, and it was amazing. You’d be so in awe and at the same time he’d be telling you to do it better. He would be like, ‘It is half time and you are 4-0 up and you have got to be 8-0 up. You can do it.’ Stuff like that. Sometimes it would be very quiet but often he was like a real cheerleader. He can mess around, especially with Michael.

The bathroom scene and the singing scene — was one more frightening than the other?

Singing. The singing was more nerve racking than the nude scene. The nude scene in the end was fine actually. I think I was nervous beforehand. I remember lying down in the bath in that bathroom and I knew that Michael was going to burst into the first take at any point and, strangely, I didn’t feel nervous at all. Whereas with the first take of the singing I was really scared. Steve always wanted it live and he wanted it in one take. So that set of requirements meant you couldn’t muck it up. We were there for about two hours and we did take, cut, take, cut. And the lyrics when you study them are desperate. It was really fun to play. I had singing lessons and a singing coach and she actually played the piano in the scene.

Have you sung much before?

I was in the choir at school. I sang in musicals and stuff but never the big roles and, weirdly, Belle & Sebastian asked me to sing on one of their songs last year. That was very scary. I was terrified. I had no idea. It was so random. They just rang up my agent and asked if I’d be interested and I was like, ‘Yeah!’ It was cool but so nerve-racking. Singing is terrifying. It was the scariest thing. Not the worst thing to do but it scared me to death.

When did you first think you wanted to do this as your career?

The first time I did a play was a musical, The King And I, when I was six in Düsseldorf. My brother was in it and I wasn’t which didn’t go down very well with me. That was the first thing I did. But I don’t think there was a light bulb moment when I thought of it as a career. I just always thought that this was what I was going to do.

And you’re currently shooting Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. Is it ever so lavish?

Yes. His style is so unique to him and he is the only person who can do it. It is amazing doing a period film and really walking into sets where the design is so grand. It is perfect. It is accurate. It is so intricate. It helps inform the role. It was the same in Shame. We were in a tiny apartment, literally, much smaller than this whole room and that confinement was so helpful. Michael and I played out scenes in one shot and it was really just the tiniest space and that made you feel claustrophobic. It is the same with Gatsby; the design and the set informs your work and it is so helpful.

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As previously reported, this four-day celebration of the arts will take place at The TimesCenter, January 5-8, 2012.

Highlights will include the cast and creators of CBS drama The Good Wife — including Emmy Award-winner Julianna Margulies, Christine Baranski, Josh Charles and the show’s creators, Robert and Michelle King (January 6 at 6pm); Emmy Award winner and Grammy Award nominee David Cross (January 5, 8pm); award-winning actor and director Alan Rickman, currently on Broadway in Seminar (January 7, 10am); celebrated composer and musician Philip Glass (January 7, 2pm); and Oscar nominee Michael Shannon (January 7 at 4pm).

Among the other featured artists are Chris Cornell, Patricia Cornwell, Clive Davis, Simon Doonan, Paul Feig, Alison Krauss, Cesar Millan, Errol Morris, Will Reiser, Seth Rogen, and Kristen Wiig.

Click here for more information and Arts & Leisure Weekend tickets.

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If there is such a thing as a safe and secure course in the development of an ingénue’s career anymore, then Mulligan has chosen not to follow that trajectory. The actress took one leading, and several supporting roles (the most high-profile of which was in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”) after “An Education” and then stopped working for a year.

When she returned it was in pursuit of projects that would move her beyond the limited scope of the classical leading lady and/or give her the opportunity to work with filmmakers that she found compelling. She began with director Nicolas Winding Refn’s urban fable/meditation on violence, “Drive.”

One of the most fascinating aspects of Mulligan’s character in “Drive” is that she is essentially a very traditional ingénue (beautiful, gentle, sweet, in emotional and physical danger) in a distinctly atypical setting. Mulligan herself, however, never envisioned Irene in quite that manner. “She was originally intended for a slightly older Latina, so I never sort of saw her as the girl, or the love interest in the film, even though she was,” she says. “That situation was a point where I hadn’t worked for awhile and I wanted to be in one of his films because I thought he made really cool films. He welcomed me into his house, and I lived with his wife and his kids, Ryan (Gosling) came round a lot and it just sort of felt like this strange commune.”

Mulligan’s next film, “Shame” (which will screen this evening as a part of the Los Angeles AFI Fest), offered the actress an opportunity to “lose herself” in a way she hadn’t done since her stage performance as Nina in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” The comparison between director Steve McQueen’s film and Checkhov’s play feels apropos in that both deal with the loss of (and aching longing for) innocence, and the characters’ fundamental inability to connect. Where “Drive” was a (metaphorical) step into a warm creative bath for the actress, “Shame” was akin to being tossed into an icy, murky, bottomless ocean. “When I read ‘Shame,’ it felt like Sissy was a character with no safety net,” Mulligan says. “And she was so far removed from anything that I had played before especially being on screen.”

For Mulligan, “Shame” was really difficult if ultimately rewarding, where “Drive” was “sort of just fun,” she says. “When I get a script, I can pick out the scenes that are going to be a hard day of work and I freak out, and I overanalyze them, and I worry about them for weeks and more often than not I’m sort of disappointed with what I do. With ‘Drive’ we were playing the fairytale side of the story. It was knight in shining armor, and girl stuck in a tower, and we had a pleasant experience. It wasn’t challenging in the way that ‘Shame’ was. It wasn’t pushing out of my boundaries; it was something that I was really comfortable in. And when I talked to Steve [about ‘Shame’], I talked a lot about how I felt passionately that I wanted to not do what I’d been doing.”

In McQueen’s film, Mulligan plays Sissy, sister to Michael Fassbender’s sexually addicted and emotionally calcified Brandon. Sissy makes an unannounced (and unwelcome) visit to her brother, which acts as a catalyst for a self-reckoning that he is neither willing nor prepared for. The siblings’ psychological development atrophied in their youth as a result of a trauma that is hinted at in the film but (rightfully) never fully explored. The purpose of the film is not to offer easily digestible answers but rather to pose textured and nuanced questions to an audience that likely has far more in common with the pair than they are comfortable confronting.

While Sissy and Brandon engage in behaviors that may seem to exist far outside the barriers of the “norm,” their motivations are all too relatable. Their individual responses to the abuse they experienced as children are almost archetypically male and female respectively.

“I think he’s decided to put himself in a very particular place” Mulligan says of Brandon. “He’s stuck in it, and he’s introverted, and he can’t become intimate with people. When he becomes intimate with people he shuts down. And I think she’s exactly the opposite. She just wants someone to save her. I think it’s not conscious, but I think that she’ll always be swept up in this dramatic cycle because she will give into any kind of experience and any kind of person she thinks might be the key to making her feel better. And it doesn’t work.”

As the title indicates, “Shame” deals with the most insidious of emotions. The shame that Sissy and Brandon experience is not born of a healthy conscious. It is a sickly residue of their youth. This shame, inherited from a poisonous family, acts as a malignant infestation. It creates addictions, compulsions, and desperate, unconscious pleas for release. Often, in women, it develops into a near constant need to apologize.

“My idea was that things were coming into her mind, constant reminders of what had gone on, images or ideas or words,” Mulligan says of her character. “And she finds ways to block them out. She’s loud, or she swears, and she provokes, and she keeps talking or she plays around with stepping forward on the subway track or she cuts herself. But definitely, she’s apologizing. She knows that her attempts to reconnect with her brother are misfiring and she can’t figure out why. She wants more than anything to find some peace with him.”

Though a shattered childhood will often bond siblings, it can also act as a wedge. The knowledge that the other is the only person who can truly comprehend the scale and manner of their internal damage attracts Sissy to the same degree that it repels Brandon. They are simultaneously each other’s dark mirror and magnet. “There is a disconnect between them,” Mulligan says. “Their shared history has put a distance between them, because they’re both so aware of what happened. And being called out on those things is very painful because when I attack him for the way he is sexually, or he attacks me for being promiscuous, we know where those things ultimately came from. And it’s so much more painful because it’s completely not discussed.”

Far from the light, communal experience that she enjoyed both on and off-set while filming “Drive,” Mulligan’s “Shame” co-star chose to maintain a divide that he believed would feed their work. “Michael and I kept quite separate from each other,” she says. “And we didn’t hang out outside of work. We didn’t talk that much apart from about the mechanics of the scenes. We just came in and did the work.”

Though she did participate in some cursory conversations with both Fassbender and McQueen about Brandon and Sissy’s background, none of the three felt that the particulars were key to the story they were telling.

Mulligan was drawn to the elements of McQueen’s approach when she saw “Hunger,” the film that brought both the director and his star Fassbender to the world’s attention. “There was honesty there,” she says. “Visually it was stunning but there was also a truth in the performances, a realness. I loved the way he filmed the actors. He seemed to give the actors a lot of space. I just loved the way he shot bodies, and faces, and eyes. There was purity to what he was doing.”

There is a common assumption that playing a character as raw and ravaged as Sissy would leave the actress damaged and depleted. For Mulligan, however, inhabiting Sissy meant a welcome opportunity to purge some universally relatable emotions.

“It’s strangely cathartic and I think that’s the thing I was kind of looking for that was similar to Nina,” she says, recalling Chekhov once more. “Because when it had gone well when I was working on ‘The Seagull,’ I would go home and feel really elated. The scenes I did with Michael were exhilarating and then we both felt kind of good afterwards. It’s great sometimes to get out that aggression.”

“Shame” was set in New York rather than London as McQueen and his writing partner Abi Morgan were unable to find anyone in Britain willing to openly discuss sexual addiction. It would appear that the citizens of the United States (and New York in particular) are far more forthcoming on the subject. The tales the scribes collected during the course of their research were so wrapped up in the culture of the city that they felt it necessary to locate the film there. As such, one might imagine that there is a more open dialogue on the nature of sex and intimacy in the U.S., and yet the irony is that our MPAA gave the film a restrictive NC-17 rating. Mulligan, like many, finds the rating both unsurprising and indicative of a bizarre moral ethos.

“I knew that Steve would never cut anything,” she says. “He was always uncompromising about what he wanted. So he was never going to cave in to a rating to make it more commercial. I do think it’s sort of an absurd contradiction with the amount of — I mean it’s such an obvious point — but the violence that we see in slasher films and horror films. That’s perfectly acceptable and then the naked body and sex is such a big deal. And the sex is not what it’s really about ultimately.”

Nor is the film truly about sexual addiction, which is merely a symptom of the true affliction: icy, unrelenting, unendurable alienation. Perhaps it is the subject matter that has frightened the MPAA. For “Shame” reveals no more or less (physically) than audiences were shown in the R rated “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”

“Nudity was so prevalent in the 70s,” Mulligan says. “You know, so many of the teen movies will have so much sex and so many people walking around in bikinis and bare-breasted and that all seems to be okay. And then the minute you show it and its not funny, and it’s not sexy, and it’s actually unattractive, then it becomes a problem, which seems so odd.”

Far from a pretty picture, “Shame” paints a gruesome portrait of two human beings who are unwilling or unable to free themselves from the clinging shadows of internally and externally driven rage. Mulligan’s resolve to explore and expose a fractured inner life and to embrace a character that is both metaphorically and physiologically flawed is indicative of the path she has chosen for herself as an actress.

“In ‘An Education,’ I was just meant to be a 16-year-old girl,” she says. “I wasn’t meant to look in any kind of way. I just looked how I looked and I enjoy that. I feel a freedom in that. And I felt a great freedom in playing Sissy. I didn’t have to worry about what I ate, or how much I drank, and I didn’t have to work out. She was an alcoholic mess. She didn’t have any money to dye her hair. I mean I didn’t become an alcoholic, but I didn’t have to watch myself.

“It was so much more exciting to play that character that didn’t worry about her appearance in any way. I knew that when I stood up in that bath naked it wasn’t about whether I looked good naked or not. It was about who she was. And I knew that I was going to grow my hair out and have crazy roots and she wasn’t going to look good in any kind of way. I’m playing Daisy right now in the ‘The Great Gatsby’ and that’s very visual. She’s meant to look very well put together and pretty, but I would always like to lean towards character roles that aren’t based on appearance.”

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On “Inside Llewyn Davis,” Mulligan will star opposite Oscar Isaac in the Scott Rudin-produced pic that the Coens are writing, directing and producing with Scott Rudin. Story follows a musician who tries to make it in the New York music scene in the 1960s.

StudioCanal is set to co-finance without a domestic distribution partner. Robert Graf will exec produce, while StudioCanal will handle international sales and distribute the film in France.

It’s not known wether Mulligan will be called upon to sing — but she’s certainly shown vocal chops with several strong performances in “Shame.”

For the Spike Jonze project, about world leaders uniting to discuss cataclysmic events, Mulligan would join Joaquin Phoenix with Charlie Kaufman penning the script.

Megan Ellison is producing through her Annapurna Pictures.

Mulligan is currently shooting “The Great Gatsby” for Warner Bros.; the plan is to jump into “Inside Llewyn Davis” in February, with the Spike Jonze pic in spring.

Mulligan, repped by CAA and Julian Belfrage and Associates, has stayed busy on the indie circuit this fall, with turns in both Fox Searchlight’s “Shame” and FilmDistrict’s “Drive” (which also stars Isaac)

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