Most women in Hollywood dread the ageing process – but Carey Mulligan says she is loving it because she gets offered better roles.

The Far From The Madding Crowd star, 29, said that she had been limited to playing teenagers for too long and was thrilled to be offered some older characters now.

She said: “I spent a lot of my early 20s playing teenagers because of my baby face. My agent in the last couple of years has started saying, ‘You’ve been offered this part, she’s 19, you’re too old’, and I’m like, ‘I’m too old? Brilliant! I’ve never been too old’.

“All the great parts come now, I think, so I’m excited.”

Carey Mulligan
Carey Mulligan (Matt Crossick/PA)

The actress, who has appeared in Drive, Shame and The Great Gatsby, added that she liked playing troubled women because they were so unlike her.

She said: “I like dark characters, and it’s fun to do things that are difficult, because I’m very happy and have had a very lovely, charmed life, lovely parents, lovely family and lovely education.

Carey Mulligan
(Dominic Lipinski/PA)

“That sounds like Schadenfreude, but it’s not that. It’s very easy to play things that you know, it’s when you have to play things that you don’t really understand that it gets fun.”

She also said that she had taught herself to enjoy public appearances more: “I think I took everything a bit too seriously. Ultimately, if you fall over on a talk show, it doesn’t matter, nobody cares. If there’s a bad photo, if you look a bit fat, you look a bit whatever, no one cares. There are much bigger things in the world.”

Far From The Madding Crowd is in cinemas now.