Carey Mulligan has failed to obtain a U.K. driving license on five different occasions.
The British actress received an Oscar nomination for her breakout performance in 2009’s An Education and has since gone on to nab roles in movies such as Drive, The Great Gatsby and Suffragette.
While Carey performs alongside some of Hollywood’s top talent, she has now admitted that the only time she cracks under the pressure is when she has to get behind the wheel of a car, and still can’t legally drive in England despite sitting the test five times.
“It’s a pressure thing,” she shared during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Tuesday night (07Nov17). “I’m an excellent driver, then I get in a test environment and someone has a clipboard and my mind explodes and I cannot do anything and I make mistakes.”
Carey sat her first test at the age of 23, as she was required to drive a manual car for a scene in 2010 movie Never Let Me Go. She sped through a driving course in five days, but failed within 90 seconds of leaving the test centre.
“I’m going up a hill and I mess up the thing and I stall and start rolling down the hill and there’s a Range Rover behind me and the instructor freaks out and does the emergency brake,” the 32-year-old recalled. “And then I get on set and they have an automatic car.”
Carey, who is married to musician Marcus Mumford, decided to try again when she was pregnant with her first child in 2015, as she thought it would be “irresponsible” not to know how to drive once she was a mother.
“I’m nine months pregnant and I book my test and I fail. And then I book another one, just ten days before I give birth, and I fail that as well,” she shared.
The Mudbound star again took the test for the fifth time when she was pregnant with her second child earlier this year, and failed again to her disappointment, even though she felt she had “nailed it”.
And while Carey has struggled with driving, she didn’t have any trouble getting a temporary license during one visit to Los Angeles.
“I did it here, it was a piece of cake. But you literally drive around the block and they give you a licence,” she laughed.
