ALL GROWN UP
As cinema audiences eagerly await Mary Poppins Returns, Emily Mortimer tells DAVINA CATT why it took turning to directing and producing for her to find true confidence
‘I
Styling ADELE CANY Photography RACHELL SMITH
wasn’t really thinking,’ says Emily Mortimer, as she recalls the initial casting stages for the role of grown-up Jane Banks in the much-anticipated Mary Poppins Returns film – the first time since Julie Andrew’s Oscar-winning incarnation in 1964 that PL Travers’ magical, imaginationcapturing nanny will descend from the skies to the big screen, holding her umbrella. ‘I just went dutifully along to a meeting with Rob Marshall [director] in New York. I hadn’t read the script, but his commitment to telling the story cast a spell over me and I called up my agent afterwards and said I have to do this role – which is so unlike me,’ she says. One of an early band of English rose ingénues to land on the small screen in the mid-90s – debuting in a TV adaptation of Catherine Cookson’s The Glass Virgin – Mortimer was subjected to the usual British sniping about her success and covetable credentials: St Paul’s Girls’ School, Oxford University and, of course, her late father, the barrister and author of Rumpole of the Bailey, Sir John Mortimer. ‘There’s something about the British habit of pigeonholing someone. For some reason in England we judge people on where they’re from, and I didn’t like it, I had an allergic reaction to it.’ This attitude took her from a slew of chocolate box adaptations in the UK – including the role of Perfect Girl in Notting Hill – to the States, where she looked to carve a varied character trajectory on her own terms. Mortimer is currently speaking to me from Melbourne, where she’s on the set of Relic, a film that is ‘about the horrors of real life’, in which her
character’s mother suffers from dementia. As an independent feature from a young female writer/ director, co-produced by Jake Gyllenhaal, it’s indicative of the unconventional path Mortimer has successfully managed to tread, segueing from bona fide Hollywood – Woody Allen’s Match Point back in 2005, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island alongside Leonardo Di Caprio (2010) and the recent HBO hit series The Newsroom by ubercreator Aaron Sorkin – to low-budget films like The Bookshop (2017), an adaptation of the 1978 novel by Penelope Fitzgerald. Along the way she met her husband, American actor Alessandro Nivola, on the set of Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000). Does she feel that the freedom of leaving England has given her a more fearless approach to life and the roles she takes? ‘Maybe,’ she ponders. ‘Your attitudes to everything change the whole time, as your life changes and you get older. It’s hard because you don’t feel like you ever really learn: with every job you start from the beginning, you come to a new country, don’t know anyone and have never worked with the director before or done a similar role. I’ve been in this industry 30 years but I still don’t feel like a professional – that’s probably what’s appealing about it.’ Despite her modest assertions, Mortimer’s career at ‘mid-age’ seems only to be in the ascendant: Mary Poppins Returns will be her sixth film set for release in 2018. Does she sense a sea change in attitudes to women in film or is she having to fight as hard as ever for nuanced and complex female roles? ‘Yes, I think there’s a major shift in attitudes to the point that it’s a good time to be a woman. Women filmmakers are becoming more supported, with producers willing to take more risks on female stories and telling them from that perspective, rather than seeing it as niche.’ ‘I am producing things too,’ she continues, in
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