How to pick a Daisy Great expectation: Carey Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio play lovers Daisy and Gatsby. Four years ago, Carey Mulligan was at a London party for her breakthrough movie, An Education, when Australian director Baz Luhrmann introduced himself. "It turned out the party was in his hotel garden so he crashed," Mulligan, the 27-year-old star of The Great Gatsby, says. He came over and asked how I was doing and I told him, 'I'm OK but this is horrible,' and he started basically talking me down. He told me, 'These things are like a wedding - you're the bride and it's not about you but about making everyone feel like they had their moment with you,' so I thought that was amazing advice. Now, the Oscar-nominated English actress has become the bride at a much grander wedding, thanks to Luhrmann, who cast her as Daisy Buchanan in his 3D adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel. "There is a huge billboard outside my hotel room with my face on it," Mulligan says in awe. We're sitting in a hotel suite at New York's iconic Plaza Hotel, the location for a pivotal scene in the film and also graced this day with exhibits from the film's costumes in the lobby while staff prepare for the premiere after-party later in the week. "I have very surreal moments where I realise I got to be in this film and it's bigger than anything else I've been involved with," she says, "but that's also very daunting, too." Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan under Baz Luhrmann's direction. The Great Gatsby follows would-be writer Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) as he comes to New York in 1922 and lands across the bay from his cousin - socialite Daisy and her philandering but wealthy husband Tom (Joel Edgerton) - and next door to a mysterious, party-giving millionaire, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). Gatsby asks Nick to invite Daisy to tea so he can try to win her back, five years after their relationship ended when she married Tom. Gatsby pulls out all stops to sweep Daisy off her feet in an all-consuming love affair that can't end well. Wearing a simple cream silk blouse over black pants, no jewellery and little make-up, Mulligan looks so plain it's hard to reconcile the woman sitting for this interview with Gatsby's alluring obsession. Fortunately, she takes this as a compliment. "I think that I try and do lots of different things and I'd like the character that I play to be bigger than my name in life," Mulligan says. I don't want to look a particular way in everything or be a brand, so I try and be as unrecognisable from one role to the next as I can. Luhrmann described the casting process as a "Gone with the Wind search," but DiCaprio says it was over as soon as they met Mulligan, despite stars such as Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman, Blake Lively and Keira Knightley lobbying for the role. Connection: Carey Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio. "We needed an actress who could embody innocence and sophistication," he says. Something inherently happened with Carey during our audition where she rested her head on my shoulder and looked up at me and I instinctively put my arms around her to protect her and there was just this incredible connection between us as characters. "Baz saw it and I saw his eyes light up and as soon as she left the room I said, 'I guess we've found the great actress of her generation."' During filming at Sydney's Fox Studios, Mulligan says her male co-stars continued to remain protective. Joel Edgerton plays Tom Buchanan. At one point I spun myself in circles to create a moment, and I ran onto set and walked straight into this huge camera, cracked my head against it and fell to the floor. Somewhere there exists a shot of Tobey and Leo both gasping loudly, racing towards the camera and picking me up off the floor to walk me arm-in-arm back to the trailer to take care of me. Mulligan says she relied heavily on research provided by her director, including a collection of Fitzgerald's love letters written to him by the two women who inspired Daisy: his first love, socialite Ginevra King, and his long-time wife, Zelda Fitzgerald. "Ginevra wrote the most beautiful love letters with the most erratic and crazy and emotional stuff in them," she says. That was really helpful for me deciding in what moments Daisy meant what she said and in what moment she was just putting something on for effect. Spot the Aussie: Elizabeth Debicki plays Jordan Baker. Born in London, Mulligan grew up in Germany living in a hotel her father managed. At age six, she began acting in school plays at the International School of Dusseldorf but she returned to England for her high school years at a Catholic boarding school, where she was student head of drama and starred in several school productions, including Sweet Charity. This was also where she met filmmaker Julian Fellowes, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Gosford Park and creator of the current television sensation Downton Abbey. "He was a guest speaker at my school and I sat next to him after and told him I wanted to be an actress and he said, 'If you're going to be an actress, you should marry a banker,' so that wasn't very helpful," Mulligan says with a grin. But when I left school, I wrote to him because he was the only person I'd ever met who was in that industry and he took me out for dinner with his wife and a few other people who'd written similar letters. He was the person who introduced me to the casting director of Pride and Prejudice, which was my first acting job. After a surprise Oscar nomination for the 2009 coming-of-age drama An Education, Mulligan followed up with films including Never Let Me Go, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Drive and Shame. Despite her hectic career, she also found time to reconnect with former childhood pen pal Marcus Mumford, lead singer of Mumford & Sons, and the pair married in 2012. "I'd rather not talk about my relationship or my husband, if that's all right," she says politely, "but I will say that I used to be a lot more focused on my career, and while I love my job and feel lucky to be able to do it, now I have my family and friends too, so it's a full life." Take six The Fitzgerald novel has spawned five previous film adaptations (1926, 1949, the 1974 version with Robert Redford, the 2000 TV movie and the 2002 modern take, G). "I think Gatsby is an American Hamlet because it's such a paradox that you can interpret it in many different times and, like Hamlet, it's meant to be done differently each time," Luhrmann says. DiCaprio adds: "It's a cipher for who we are and where we are at any given time in history and our lives. When I read the book in high school, I thought of it as a traditional love story and saw Gatsby as this hopeless romantic, but reading it as an adult, I see it as a tragedy and Gatsby as this really hollow man, not at all in touch with reality. Take six The Fitzgerald novel has spawned five previous film adaptations (1926, 1949, the 1974 version with Robert Redford, the 2000 TV movie and the 2002 modern take, G). Spot the Aussie ■ Joel Edgerton plays Tom Buchanan, a role he won after Ben Affleck dropped out to direct Argo. ■ Elizabeth Debicki plays American golfer Jordan Baker, Daisy's best friend. ■ Jason Clarke and Isla Fisher play doomed couple George Wilson - the cuckolded garage owner - and Myrtle, who cheats on him with Tom Buchanan. ■ Jack Thompson plays the therapist who encourages Nick Carraway to write down his story while treating him in a sanitarium years later. ■ Steve Bisley plays Dan Cody, the father figure who takes young Gatsby under his wing in flashbacks. ■ Callan McAuliffe plays the young Jay Gatsby in flashback. ■ Vince Colosimo plays Michaelis, who works for George Wilson. ■ Adelaide Clemens plays Myrtle's sister, Catherine. The Great Gatsby is in cinemas on May 30.