The Discreet Charm Of Emily Mortimer
Without design, a typical Mortimer role has evolved. Such a thing exists, despite her having played Princess Di, a leather-clad assassin, and—this summer, in Cars 2—a Jaguar XJR-15. It’s a type best identified through a process of triangulation plotted from such known points as the naïve rich girl in Match Point, the actress with a secret in City Island, and Alec Baldwin’s girlfriend with avian bone syndrome on 30 Rock. Humor and a willingness to appear vulnerable are the common denominators. The roles, it seems, choose her, an idea she is less happy about with her next live-action movie: Our Idiot Brother, scheduled for release in August. Directed by Emily’s friend Jesse Peretz, it stars Paul Rudd as the eponymous dimwit, a sweet-natured hippie whose never-failing trust in humanity lands him in jail. On release, he falls into his sisters’ laps like a guileless hand grenade, bringing chaos and (no surprise here) becoming a catalyst for positive change in his family’s staid lives. Emily plays one of his sisters, a woman trapped in a failing marriage to a man played by Steve Coogan.
“I’ve just given birth to my second child and I live in a brownstone in Brooklyn and my husband isn’t behaving how he should be,” she says, sketching the character. “At the time, I had just had my second baby and I live in a brownstone in Brooklyn, and I felt slightly pissed off about that.”
But it’s the kind of mirroring between life and art that recurs in her life, which, to the casual observer, resembles a long string of happy accidents. Her father was a wit and an indulgent bon vivant, a great stimulus for a developing mind. As well as being a household name as a writer, he was counsel for the defense in a number of high-profile cases and once championed in court the use of the word “Bollocks” on the Sex Pistols’ first LP. She grew up in the Chilterns, a landscape as benign and cozy as a quilted bedspread. A film-industry fairy godmother spotted her in a student production. She met her husband (the American actor Alessandro Nivola) on the set of Love’s Labours Lost, and progressed rapidly from the merely brilliant Branagh to directors in the Jovian class. Even her decision to move to Brooklyn was taken at random but turned out for the best. “I knew nothing about Brooklyn when I moved here,” she says. “I might as well have stuck a pin in a map.” Initially a reluctant émigré, relocating to the US for her husband’s sake, she has since reconciled herself to an expatriate existence in the British ghetto that is Boerum Hill. In the ’hood, Building on Bond is her office; Rucola, a few doors from her home, the restaurant of choice.