Carey Mulligan’s comfort zone is not like our comfort zone, as evidenced by pretty much any of the films she’s made over the past 14 years. From playing Kathy, a clone created for the purposes of organ donation in Never Let Me Go, to the radicalized and raging Maud Watts in Suffragette; or Sissy, a damaged and wayward singer, in Shame, she’s repeatedly drawn to complex, nuanced women, not always easy to like or comfortable to watch. “For me, it’s literally been like, ‘Oh, that’s quite scary. I don’t know how to do that,’” says Mulligan of how she chooses her roles. “And then, ‘Oh, I should probably do it then.’”

We’re meeting on a Monday morning – a welcome excuse for Mulligan to put some makeup on and leave the house, she says – in a members’ club in West London, where she’s a regular; the 33-year-old recently started a film club with her friends and they head to the cinema next door once a month (where she tries her best to tolerate the noisy eaters). She arrives early, immediately warm and animated, dressed simply in jeans, a blouse and boots. The actress lives nearby with her husband of six years, the musician Marcus Mumford, and their two children, Evelyn, three, and Wilfred, one. Having a young family has inevitably changed the way she approaches her work: on a purely practical level, she simply doesn’t have the time to do the months of research or write the long journals that she previously used to prepare for roles. And now, the desirability of a part also has to outweigh her urge to be home in time to see her children. “My agent, who I’ve been with since I was 18, said to me after An Education [the 2009 drama for which Mulligan was nominated for an Oscar and won a BAFTA], ‘You’re in this very rare moment where you can be patient and wait for the right things and you shouldn't take anything unless you can’t bear the idea of anyone else doing it,’” she says. “I think [now that I’m a mother], it might’ve just gone up one or two degrees from where I was before and I make sure that I’m doing things absolutely for the right reason.”

It does mean however, that even though Mulligan is as acclaimed for her theater work as she is for her films, she doesn’t think she’ll be heading back on stage any time soon. “It’s great because you get all day with [the children],” she says, “but you miss bath time every night, and putting your kids to bed is the best thing. I mean, it can be a total nightmare, but it’s also a lovely thing.”

Right now, women in Hollywood are pushing through their own projects in an effort to create better films and parts. Mulligan would like to join their ranks – she’s working on developing a biography of Kate Webb, an Australian journalist who was captured by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam war – but she’s conflicted about the idea of directing. “I slightly lose interest if I get involved too early in something,” she says. “In a completely spoilt way, the most exciting thing is getting a script and it being relatively done and being able to get excited about it without being involved in the machinery of it. But then, will I just keep complaining about there not being enough interesting roles and lean on other brilliant women to create them? I mean, there are people doing extraordinary things, like Reese Witherspoon and Jessica Chastain. I don’t know if I’ve got the capacity for that in this moment in my life. I hope that I will in the future, because I think it’s amazing, but right now it feels beyond me.”

Her latest film, Wildlife, is directed by actor Paul Dano, who co-wrote the script with his partner, Zoe Kazan (both long-time friends of Mulligan). Based on the novel by Richard Ford, it’s set in 1960s Montana and charts the breakdown of the marriage between long-suffering housewife Jeanette (Mulligan) and her husband, Jerry (played by Jake Gyllenhaal). “I just thought she was such a rarely seen character,” says Mulligan. “She has an affair, she makes mistakes, she’s not perfect. You don’t see women messing up like that and being human, really. I’ve done jobs before where there’ve been interesting parts of the character that have been smoothed and removed in the edit like Botox, and the director says, ‘Yeah, we tested it and [the audience] really don’t like it when she’s not nice.’ Morally objectionable choices seem to be filtered out quite a lot for women. Not for men. For men, it’s quite sexy and cool that they’re craggy and stinking of smoke. But for women, it’s like ‘Oooh, no.’”