Carey Mulligan on the MPAA: "I Do Think It's Kind of An Absurd Contradiction"

Carey Mulligan says she took a lot of risks when filming her nude movie Shame, and going full frontal in a shower scene wasn't the worst of it. Her biggest challenge? Belting out "New York, New York" in a nightclub scene (Carey's character is a struggling cabaret singer):

"It's scarier to sing than to do nudity," Carey told E! News at the Hollywood Film Awards. "Singing is like really exposing yourself. I was playing sort of a singer, so I was pretending to have a talent I don't necessarily believe I have. So singing was quite scary."

But Carey isn't quite so timid when it comes to speaking out on Shame's NC-17 rating, a distinction that is usually considered "the kiss of death" for a film thanks to restrictions on advertising and distribution. But Shame's distributor, Fox Searchlight, is aggressively supporting the film's edgy content, and so its its star:

“I knew that [director Steve McQueen] would never cut anything,” she says in a new interview with HitFix. “I do think it's sort of an absurd contradiction with the amount of -- I mean it’s such an obvious point -- but the violence that we see in slasher films and horror films. That's perfectly acceptable and then the naked body and sex is such a big deal."

Carey goes on to reminisce about the good old days of movie nudity (aka the '70s), a subject that's very close to Mr. Skin's own hard-on:

"Nudity was so prevalent in the 70s,” she said. “You know, so many of the teen movies will have so much sex and so many people walking around in bikinis and bare-breasted and that all seems to be okay. And then the minute you show it and its not funny, and it's not sexy, and it's actually unattractive, then it becomes a problem, which seems so odd."

We doubt that your bare flesh could ever be unattractive, but we're with you, Carey. Wanna come over and watch H.O.T.S. (1979) sometime?

Members can see more from Carey Mulligan right here at the Mr. Skin blog!