Reblogged for Carey. FYI, I’ve Googled screencaps of said nude scene, and she looks fantastic. So proud of you, bbygirl. Boom. Moving on.Transforming a Body - and a Performance
What does it take to make an Oscar-worthy performance for an actress? From Nicole Kidman’s nose to Charlize Theron’s pounds, a physical transformation is often key. The Bagger took a close look at the hopefuls in this season’s race, who endured piercings and shavings (Rooney Mara in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”), gained weight (Michelle Williams, who wanted it for her curves in “My Week With Marilyn”) and added British teeth (Meryl Streep in “The Iron Lady”). In “Albert Nobbs,” Glenn Close and Janet McTeer even changed gender, a process that Ms. McTeer said quickly gave her a window into her character.
“I put on boots that were much too big and flattened my chest,” she said, adding later, “To have a chest by definition is quite vulnerable, men don’t have that, they don’t feel stared at or judged by that. And the comfort of that not being there, which would be very male, you could feel invulnerable, and like you could punch something.”
Nudity, too, seems to play a part for Oscar hopefuls, at least when they’re women. Steve McQueen’s “Shame” may be the one exception: both Michael Fassbender, as Brandon, a despondent sex addict, and Carey Mulligan, as his unstable sister, Sissy, bare all – Ms. Mulligan in her very first moment on screen. Mr. Fassbender’s body is quite taut; Ms. Mulligan’s less so – a bit of realism that is rare in film today.
“I had days of walking around New York with Steve, just talking about films and how women’s bodies are portrayed in cinema, and the absurdity of the expectation of how you’re meant to look and as an actress how you’re meant to look,” Ms. Mulligan told us yesterday. “Mentally, I was never against the idea. I knew she didn’t go to the gym and diet, she drank and ate, and so I had fun and didn’t worry about what I looked like. And by the time we were filming I felt free. It was quite fun in a way because it was the perfect way to flaunt abandon, in that scene. It was kind of liberating.”
Ms. Mulligan, who called the Bagger from a train speeding through the British countryside, filmed “Shame” just a few months after completing “Drive,”which gave her the chance to work with Ryan Gosling and the director Nicolas Winding Refn – the main reason she wanted to do the movie. Before that, she hadn’t worked for a year, frustrated with the kinds of scripts she was getting, she said.
She credited “Shame” with reigniting her sense of performance. “Sissy is by the far the most extreme character I’ve played on screen,” she said. With one exception, “there was no days when I went home feeling bad. It was so cathartic.”
(via superwholockianlady)
