As the weather in many regions in the United States starts to cool down and the leaves turn, it’s time to shift our viewing habits accordingly. Namely, Carol season, also known as “Christmas season” by some, approaches.
It appears Carol is also on the stars’ minds as well, or at least Sarah Paulson’s. The actor, who’s in a real-life May-December lesbian relationship, recently mentioned the 2015 film when asked by the European fashion magazine Grazia UK about what previous roles she’d love to “dig back into.”
“I would have loved to… go back and make a movie about the relationship that Carol and Abby had prior to the movie beginning,” Paulson said in an interview.
In the film, Abby (played by Paulson) is a minor character who had an affair with Carol years prior, providing the basis for her husband’s suspicions toward Therese (Rooney Mara), the younger woman with whom Carol becomes enamoured. And in a classic case of queer women being inseparable from their exes, Abby also makes for a great wingman later in the film when Carol ghosts Therese to go fight for custody of her child, even driving Therese all the way from Chicago back to New York City. Queer culture!
But according to Paulson, Abby has a much larger role in The Price of Salt, the 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel upon which Carol is based. Fingers crossed that Paulson really means it when she says: “I’ll talk to Todd Haynes and Cate Blanchett and see if they’re interested.”
Fans held out brief hopes of a Carol sequel earlier this year when behind-the-scenes photos of Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett made the rounds on social media. As noted by fellow LGBTQ+ site The Advocate, the pictures could convincingly look like the makings of Carol 2 — with the snow falling, the flawless costuming, and Blanchett smoking a cigarette clad in leather gloves and what appears to be a leopard-print dress.
Alas, the shots are from the set of Nightmare Alley, a forthcoming film by Guillermo del Toro which is rumored to resume production this week after being forced to halt due to COVID-19.
Though del Toro’s work isn’t even remotely similar to Carol director Todd Haynes’, Nightmare Alley promises some gay energy, with fellow queer icon Toni Collette co-starring. Plus, there’s a mention of bimbos in the synopsis of the book on which the movie is based.
