Carey Mulligan poses as Gatsbys Daisy Buchanan for Vogue: gorgeous or weird?

May 2024 · 3 minute read

Carey Mulligan covers the May issue of Vogue Magazine. Or should I say, Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby covers the May issue. The pictorial is a theme on Gatsby, because Gatsby premieres at the Cannes Film Festival and opens in wide release in less than a month. So, the promotional tour for The Great Gatsby begins now. I’m kind of excited! I actually want to see the film, although I’m pretty sure it will drive me crazy and I’ll want to yell “SETTLE DOWN” at Baz Luhrmann.

So, what are your thoughts on the pictorial? I kind of hate it. Mario Testino photographed Carey-as-Daisy in various Art Deco settings and the whole thing turned out weird. Many of the photos just seem much, much too cold and I’m too busy looking at the décor and not the lady or the clothes. I don’t think this is one of Testino’s better shoots – you can see the full slideshow here.

Since it’s a Monday and since I’m tired, I haven’t read the whole interview with Carey. I look forward to reading it at some point, and if you’re interested, go here to read the full piece. I read the first page and I pulled my favorite two paragraphs, where Carey compares Zelda Fitzgerald to a Kardashian.

[Mulligan] doesn’t seem too concerned, having brought with her instead a collection of battered paperbacks and a large sheaf of photocopied letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald from Ginevra King, the sixteen-year-old Chicago debutante with whom Fitzgerald first fell in love and who gave him the outline for so many of the women in his fiction. Princeton University Library copied the entire unpublished set for Mulligan, who devoured them as bedside reading, “soaking up her view of the world, the way she spoke,” she says, turning to one of the letters. “ ‘Yours ’til the little devils in hell go skating.’ I love that. ‘There’s so little to me that I’m not hard to forget quickly. . . .’ That dichotomy between Daisy having that attitude but meaning the exact opposite. . . .”

She dives again into her biography of Zelda, who, along with King, went into what Mulligan calls “my Daisy cocktail”: “ ‘I seem always curiously interested in myself, and it’s so much fun to stand off and look at me. . . .’ That’s a direct Zelda quote. It’s that kind of feeling: I’m-so-little-and-there’s-nothing-to-me, watch-me-have-nothing-to-me. She feels like she’s living in a movie of her own life. She’s constantly on show, performing all the time. Nothing bad can happen in a dream. You can’t die in a dream. She’s in her own TV show. She’s like a Kardashian.”

[From Vogue]

I’ve never really thought of Zelda as a Kardashian, but I think Carey is on to something. Not that the side-by-side comparison holds up completely, but there are probably a decent number of similarities. Funny.

Photos courtesy of Mario Testino/VOGUE, slideshow here.

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