Emily Mortimer

The Weight of the Mortimer Name

Emily Mortimer never set out to be an actress when she was studying Russian at Oxford. Her father was John Mortimer (the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey), and the weight of literature in their home felt almost suffocating. But a producer saw her in a university play, and her life plans changed completely.

London felt small to her very quickly.

She made her film debut in The Ghost and the Darkness in 1996. She played the wife of Val Kilmer in a blockbuster about man-eating lions that did not perform very well at the box office. It didn't bring her worldwide fame, but it gave her enough to buy a one-way ticket to Los Angeles with barely any savings in the bank.

Woody Allen's Journey to Sorkin

Woody Allen chose her for Match Point in 2005 without a conventional audition. They only talked for a few minutes in a hotel. She played Chloe (the naive heiress who falls victim to a social climber's deception), and the film gave her a visibility in the United States that British independent cinema could not offer.

And the gamble paid off.

Before that shoot, she had already worked on Scream 3 and in the comedy Lovely and Amazing in 2001. But her role in Lars and the Real Girl (2007) made it clear she could carry dramatic weight alongside actors such as Ryan Gosling. By then, Mortimer was already a familiar face in the casts of directors with intellectual pretensions.

In 2012, she landed The Newsroom. Aaron Sorkin wrote the character of MacKenzie McHale looking for a woman capable of spitting out dialogue at a suicidal pace without losing her composure. So Mortimer kept up with the machine-gun scripts for three straight seasons on HBO.

Sorkin doesn't let a single mistake slide in the script.

Total Control Behind the Camera

Mortimer grew tired of waiting for the phone to ring with offers from others, so she created her own production company. In 2013 she launched Doll & Em with her childhood friend Dolly Wells. It was a semi-autobiographical series about friendship and professional rivalry, shot on a minimal budget and a lot of improvisation.

In 2021, she decided she wanted to direct professionally. She adapted the novel The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford for the BBC. She wrote the screenplay for the three episodes and gave herself a supporting role as a mother who abandons her children to pursue her own romances.

In 2024 she took on the role of Elsa Schiaparelli in Apple TV+'s The New Look. The shoot in Paris was demanding, with costume design requiring hours of technical fittings before stepping onto set. That same year she replaced Sally Hawkins as Mrs. Brown in the movie Paddington in Peru.

The production of this third installment in the bear franchise had an estimated cost of $40 million. Filming was split between London and various jungle locations in Colombia during the summer of 2023.