Tim Key says Carey Mulligan was the key to unlocking The Ballad of Wallis Island as a feature film

CBC

09-04-2025

Back in 2007, while writing comedy sketches together, Tim Key and Tom Basden came up with an idea for a short film, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island. It follows a lottery winner named Charles who hires a jaded folk singer, Herb McGwyer, to perform for him on his private island.
Now, 18 years later, that short has been adapted into a feature film, The Ballad of Wallis Island, starring Key, Basden and Carey Mulligan. In an interview with Q 's Tom Power, Key says he and Basden never planned to turn their "small idea" into a full-length movie, but they couldn't stop thinking about it.
"Ultimately, I think, we just needed one final piece in the jigsaw which unlocked it as a feature film," Key says. "I guess that was when we came up with the idea of the folk musician in the story was part of a folk duo that no longer played together — and it was his girlfriend."
WATCH | Official trailer for The Ballad of Wallis Island:
Expanding on their original premise, Key and Basden created a new character named Nell Mortimer, played by Mulligan. The Ballad of Wallis Island sees Charles using his money to reunite his favourite group of all time, the folk rock duo McGwyer Mortimer, who've been acrimoniously separated for years.
Key says Mulligan was at the top of their list to play Nell. "We wanted her because she's just an incredibly nice presence on screen and very human. In a film where other people are having a lot of problems, she's playing quite a together person, but a very kind of compassionate person. I mean, she just put so much of Carey Mulligan into the way she played it."
While Key had never met Mulligan, he did have her email address from an unrelated project. She replied immediately saying that she'd love to read the script.
"We just got lucky that she knew who we were," he says. "She'd watched stuff and listened to stuff that me and Tom had done for, like, a decade, but you just don't know that until you reach out to someone. And we may have reached out to someone different, or Carey may not have had any idea who we were, in which case you don't get that person to be in your movie. But I think, so luckily, we were pushing against one of the doors which was slightly ajar."
The Ballad of Wallis Island hits theatres across Canada on April 11.