Carey Mulligan didn’t like her performance in The Great Gatsby

IT WAS an undeniable box office hit — grossing $438 million worldwide — but Carey Mulligan still has an issue with The Great Gatsby.

THE Great Gatsby was an undeniable box office hit, grossing a staggering $438 million worldwide.

But lead actress Carey Mulligan had one big problem with the movie: her own acting.

In this week’s cover story with Variety, Mulligan confessed that she had doubts about her 2013 performance as Daisy Buchanan.

“I didn’t love my work in Gatsby,” Mulligan says about the Baz Luhrmann spectacle. “I’m not sure if I slightly kind of lost my way because I was intimidated by the scale of it. I think I might have been overawed by my experience and intimidated by the level of performances around me.”

She continued, “It was how big it was and how visual it was. I definitely felt there were fleeting moments where I really found the character and then I felt like I lost her a little bit. I’ve never been wholly thrilled about my work in it.”

Mulligan beat out every actress in Hollywood when she nailed an audition with Leonardo DiCaprio to play Daisy. “It was almost like this America’s Got Talent casting thing around the role,” she said. “And then it was the expectation of playing the part.”

Mulligan is critical of her performance as Daisy.

She crammed non-stop about the 1920s and author F. Scott Fitzgerald. “I love the character so much and I spent so much time preparing,” she said. “It might not have translated onto the screen. I think I let my own security get in my own way. In that respect, I wish I could do it again.”

On the other hand, it’s notoriously hard translating a Fitzgerald character into film. “It was just a tricky one,” Mulligan said. “Maybe I tried to put too many things in and they ended up blurring. And maybe I could have been more specific. I found the world so fascinating in Zelda and Ginevra King” — the socialite who is believed to be Fitzgerald’s muse — “and everything around F. Scott Fitzgerald and their relationship.”

Mulligan has a tendency not to watch her own films at the premiere. “I’m terrible and sitting through,” she said.

She confessed she hasn’t seen the finished version of Drive, the 2011 favourite starring Ryan Gosling.

“About a year later, I was on an aeroplane, and I was like, ‘F*** it. I’m going to watch it because so many people really liked it,’” Mulligan says. “I got about 20 minutes in and the air hostess walked past me and I was on the screen, and I was like, ‘I can’t be the person watching my own film.’ So I turned it off and put on some other sh** film.”

Mulligan conceded that her experience with Gatsby may have led to her doing smaller pictures, where there’s a comfort in knowing the name of every person on the crew.

“Maybe it made me a little more independent-film-centric to try to find something more containable,” she said.

This story originally appeared in the NY Post.