Carey Mulligan didn’t get advice from Marcus Mumford on playing a folk singer

To prepare to play a former folk artist and singer-songwriter, one would think that having one of them at home might be the best resource.

But that wasn’t true for Carey Mulligan, who plays retired musician Nell Mortimer, half of the former folk duo Mortimer and McGwyer (that’s Herb McGwyer, played by British comedian Tom Basden), in The Ballad of Wallis Island. The film expands to theaters nationwide on Friday.

Mulligan has been married to Mumford & Sons frontman Marcus Mumford since 2012, but she says he was surprisingly less helpful than one might expect.

“He was useless,” Mulligan quips, before relaying a story of how she absorbed something from over the years of watching Mumford perform that ultimately helped her build the character.

“One thing that I took away from being married to him for a long time [is that] I am often watching him start playing with someone,” she explains. “They’ll be at a festival and he’ll sit down, and they’ll play and sing a song together. Watching the way that people who sing together, people who are professional singers or in bands, there’s almost zero consciousness of how they’re doing it.”

“They just open their mouths and the sound comes out,” she continues. “Their body doesn’t even shift. They don’t sit up; they don’t adjust themselves or anything. That was the only thing, watching Marcus over the years sing with people backstage. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.'”

This wasn’t the first time Mulligan had sung for an audience. She provided vocals for Belle and Sebastian’s “Write About Love” in 2010. And more notably, she performed “New York, New York” in 2011’s Shame, which she describes as an entirely different experience from her numbers in Wallis Island.

“That was intimidating because [director] Steve [McQueen] was determined that it be one five-minute close-up of singing the song,” she says. “[Wallis Island] was not intimidating. I couldn’t have been made to feel more cozy and welcome in this whole setup. It was just the best and loveliest job.”

Though Mumford may not have coached Mulligan in portraying a musician, he was quite excited for her to participate in the film, as he is a massive fan of Tom Basden and Tim Key’s prior work as a comedy duo. That’s how Mulligan was first introduced to the duo, who shepherded The Ballad of Wallis Island from a 2007 short they co-wrote to this feature-length version.

“We were familiar with their comedy work,” Mulligan says. “My husband originally introduced me to The Late Night Poetry Hour radio show that they had done for a long time, and we loved that. Marcus had Instagram DMed Tim to say what a big fan he was.”

As such, when Mulligan received an email from Key sharing the script and asking if she was interested in being part of the film, Mumford was overjoyed. “Marcus was so excited,” Mulligan adds. “Before I even read it, he was like, ‘Well, you have to do it.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m going to read the script, but yes, I will probably do it.’ He’s skipped a couple of my films, but he came to the premiere of this one.”

The Ballad of Wallis Island follows widower Charles Heath (Key), a lottery winner living on a remote island, who invites musician Herb McGwyer (Basden) and McGwyer’s former partner Nell Mortimer (Mulligan) to perform a private one-night-only concert for him. However, Herb doesn’t know that Nell is invited, and when she arrives, it sends the exes into a tailspin as they reflect on past loves and mistakes.

The character of Nell was added to the feature script, having not been a character in the original 2007 short.

“In the short film, it’s these two strangers meeting and not really getting on,” says Basden. “A lot of the comedy comes from the fact that I take an instant disliking to Tim’s character and he’s trying to keep me happy. It’s only really at the end that we reach an equilibrium, but there’s a simplicity to that that works in a short.”

“But when we were approaching the feature, we realized that introducing Nell was a way to give a depth to it, but also to introduce the idea of people who are at a certain stage in their life where things either are about to change [or need to],” he continues. “It means that we can explore the ideas of regret and nostalgia, whether nostalgia is a good or bad thing for people, and make a film that has layered themes about people who need a new start in life in some way.”