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Emily Mortimer's Breakout Performance
By Bob Strauss - Famous Magazine | Thursday, February 18, 2010 | Famous Magazine , Interviews | () Comments | Add a Comment

Emily Mortimer and Martin Scorsese


When is the rest of the world going to fall in love with Emily Mortimer like those in the know did long ago?


Probably not after seeing Martin Scorsese’s psycho-thriller Shutter Island, in which the 38-year-old plays escaped, homicidal and otherwise frightening mental patient Rachel Solando — the character whose disappearance draws a couple of U.S. Marshals (Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo) to a remote psychiatric hospital.


But please don’t let that distort your impression of the actor, who is, in reality, sweet, smart and ingratiatingly funny. The daughter of the late British attorney and scriptwriter Sir John Mortimer ("Rumpole of the Bailey"), Emily has displayed a near limitless range of acting ability, nailing everything from vulnerable sexy (Lovely and Amazing, Young Adam, Woody Allen’s Match Point) to steely supportive (Redbelt, Lars and the Real Girl) to morally ambiguous (Transsiberian). And like it needs to be said, she’s as adorable as she is talented. We recently spoke with the woefully underappreciated Mortimer by phone.


You make some pretty intense movies when you’re not doing Pink Panther flicks.

“I’m at my best, almost, when I put myself in extreme situations. I become very calm and I know how to handle it. It’s sort of everyday life that makes me start to panic.”


And now you’re a crazy person in Shutter Island. Was that fun?

“On my second day on the set, I had to go mad. There was Ben Kingsley, and Mark Ruffalo, and Leonardo DiCaprio, and Martin f---ing Scorsese, and I kept thinking, I don’t know what I’m going to do! I should have watched more documentaries on mad people! I watched a DVD and I talked to a brilliant psychiatrist who was working on the movie. But in the end, you just have to make your own choice about what you’re going to do. I probably got it wrong, but I felt like I vaguely understood what was required of me in this movie, which is brilliant and terrifying and, on some level, almost like those strange, perverse 1950s B movies. I think it’s full of references to Sam Fuller and Michael Powell films, which Marty’s obsessed with.”


Well, it’s set in the era of Shock Corridor and Black Narcissus.

“Yes, I was playing a perfect ’50s housewife who happens to be a complete psychotic. I think that era was conducive to mental instability. The book, script and movie all had this feeling of, is it me that’s mad or is it the rest of the world? Especially for women at that time, who were left at home all day, looking after the kids or living in this kind of lonely, Stepford Wife existence. They probably felt like they wanted to scream or stab someone. The claustrophobia of being the perfect woman, that’s what I had in my head.”


Please tell us Leo was nice and helpful.

“All of my scenes are with Leo. I liked him very much. I mean, everyone’s so nice about everyone when they talk about working with people, but I really, genuinely felt that he was such a down-to-earth person. He didn’t play the role of the big film star at all. He was easygoing and chatty and funny, but at the same time not showing off at all. He was really easy to be around, and made it much less embarrassing and mortifying for me than it could have been.”


And Mr. Scorsese?

“He is the least intimidating genius that I’ve ever met. Most geniuses are pretty terrifying, and you feel like you’ve got to sort of plan what you say around them before it comes out. But he’s so affable and he loves talking. And he loves to chat about movies, which is the best part. It was like a sort of master class in film history, being with him.”


For someone with such an impressive resumé, you seem a little less confident than you ought to be. Is that just a natural personality trait?

“I was very shy as a kid. I used to dread social interaction or having to talk in class or anything like that. I found it just excruciating. But there was something about overcoming that terror; I guess it’s sort of like aversion therapy, where they make people who are terrified of pigeons hold a pigeon. I realized quite early on that if I did the thing that I was almost most scared of, it wasn’t so bad; in fact, it was quite good. Somehow I wasn’t shy when I was acting. I really don’t understand it, there must be some subconscious thing going on behind it — or not.”


Is that why you still seek the most challenging or disturbing roles you can find?

“I’ve worked out over the years that I have to be interested in the job that I’m doing. It seems so simple, but you forget these simple things sometimes. You have to be really interested in what you’re doing to have any chance of being any good in it or contributing anything to yourself. I guess, for that reason, I keep getting taken further and further into weirder and weirder set-ups.”


You’re as English as a red rose is, well, red. Yet you’ve been living with your husband (American actor Alessandro Nivola) and your son in New York for a number of years now. Ever get homesick?

“I miss England terribly. But I’ve missed England so much for so long, I’ve now kind of got bored of missing England because it’s just too exhausting. I spent the first six years of being with my husband begging to go back there, but now I’ve just given up. Actually, in some ways, it probably has something to do with that thing we’ve been talking about this whole time, which is forcing yourself into different situations. And so I now have decided it’s a privileged position to be in — much to my husband’s relief — to have a perspective on the world that isn’t myopic like it can be if you stay in the same place. But if I could get my mom and my sister and her family and my three best friends and all their children to all move to Brooklyn, then I’d be perfectly happy.”


Bob Strauss lives in L.A. where he writes about movies.



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