Carey Mulligan recently appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to talk about her current Off-Broadway, play Girls and Boys at the Minetta Lane Theatre. Mulligan limped a bit due to her broken toe—which, she explained, was not the injury she incurred during previews that caused the show to cancel early performances and extend its run to July 22.
“On the first preview, we had a mistiming thing,” Mulligan explained. “About three quarters of the way through ... the curtain—which is made of metal and wood—came down on my head.
“Then I carried on because the lights were up and I didn’t know what to do. But I felt kind of fine and it didn’t hurt, and then I got off and it really hurt,” she continued. “Then I got up to my dressing room and the director was there, and she was like, ‘Are you alright?’ And I was like, ‘No, no, it really really hurts,’ and someone came over and said, ‘Well, Bradley Cooper's here.’”
The star of screen and stage—having most recently starred on Broadway in The Elephant Man in 2014—wanted to greet Mulligan.
“He’s someone I’ve met a couple of times and I don’t know very well but is unbelievably nice... But I was also crying on the floor in my dressing room.” But Cooper turned out to be the help she needed: “He came and got down on the floor with me and took me to urgent care.”
“What was their reaction when Bradley Cooper came in with Carey Mulligan?” asked host Colbert.
“They could not have cared less about me, but they were absolutely floored with Bradley Cooper coming in. And I felt like I was giving them a gift in some way.”
Mulligan previously appeared on the New York stage in Skylight, for which she earned a 2015 Tony nomination. Prior to that, she made her Broadway debut in The Seagull in 2008. She earned an Oscar nomination for her work in An Education in 2010.
Written by Dennis Kelly and directed by Lyndsey Turner, Girls and Boys marks Mulligan’s first solo show and is also available for download on Audible. Watch the full video above to hear the story of her broken toe, the full details about Cooper, the craziest things that have happened during the play’s run, and more.
