TORONTO—The producers of Never Let Me Go got lucky. Fox Searchlight had bought the Kazuo Ishiguro book and Keira Knightley had signed on to play the second lead in a story about children who grow up realizing their lives will be short. However, they needed a lead actor who had some box-office clout. Carey Mulligan won the role. In a Toronto hotel room at the Toronto International Film Festival, she says that a chance attendance at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival screening of An Education—for which she was nominated for an Oscar more than a year later—led directly to her casting.

“I think that someone from Fox Searchlight was in Sundance, and because we got nice reviews they told other people from the studio that they should meet me. I think that up until that point I hadn’t been seen for an audition because they needed financing. About a week after Sundance, I auditioned and got the job. They already had Keira, and then they filled up the cast with a lot of talented big names, but I think Education was definitely helpful for me.”

Never Let Me Go stars Mulligan, Knightley, and Andrew Garfield as teenagers who are aware that their destiny is to provide spare body parts for others when they become young adults. They are encouraged by rumours from their exclusive boarding school that some couples will be given some extra years of life if they can prove that they have the capacity to fall in love.

When Mulligan was approached by the movie’s producers after Sundance, she had no hesitation. She had read Ishiguro’s 2005 novel not long after it came out and had already selected the role she wanted to play. “I knew that they would make a film, and I just hoped that it would happen when I was old enough to play Kathy, because when the book ends she is 31, and I was 22 at the time. When the screenplay compressed the years [to 28], I was excited and I really wanted it to be good, because it [the book] was a real favourite of mine. I thought, ”˜If they mess it up it will be horrible.’ I felt like the script was perfect and the people involved with the film before I came along were perfect. My agent told me last year that I should only take a role if I couldn’t bear the idea of anyone else taking it. I couldn’t bear the idea of anyone else playing Kathy, and I felt it had to be mine. I felt that other people could do it brilliantly, but I didn’t want that to happen.”

Mulligan fans will have two film options on Friday (September 24). That is the day that Never Let Me Go opens in Vancouver—the same day she will be seen as Michael Douglas’s daughter in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Mulligan is in a relationship with Shia LaBeouf, the actor who plays her boyfriend in Wall Street, but she says that they have made an effort to avoid publicity. Although that may change with future movies, she still enjoys anonymity.

“We’re not in the public eye,” she says. “We are on-screen and at festivals together, but we aren’t followed when we are at home, so it [invasion of privacy] is not a problem. I was in the gondola at Telluride [Festival] and people were talking about Never Let Me Go and I was sitting opposite them and they didn’t recognize me, and they were talking freely about the movie! If you don’t go to nightclubs, which is my idea of hell, then you should be okay. I am not devastated to not go to cool restaurants. It is not really taking anything from my life.”