Emily Mortimer is in Cleveland, Ohio, where her kids are acting in an upcoming Noah Baumbach movie. And she loves it there. “It feels very exotic somehow to me. I’m really into it. It’s really cool, pretty mellow, and nice,” she tells me.
That’s not the assessment of Cleveland I expected from the English writer, actor, and now, director. But lately, Mortimer has been seeking chiller vibes. After an acting career in which she has doubted performances at nearly every turn—even though both she and her husband, Alessandro Nivola, are very good at the job, as apparently are their children—she’s finally starting to see her power.
Of course, that had to happen once she climbed into the director’s chair. After cocreating and starring in the cult-hit show Doll & Em with her friend Dolly Wells, Mortimer was brought on by producers to write a script for the BBC adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s witty and satirical 1945 novel, The Pursuit of Love. Lily James, who was coproducing and already attached to play lead character Linda Radlett, encouraged Mortimer to direct.
“I felt very impressed by what an actor’s job is and how amazing it is, because at any given moment on a set, the person who is doing the most difficult thing of anyone is the actor,” Mortimer says. “To be able to perform and have it be real and emotionally connected and entertaining and funny and free and alive and all the things that it has to be—it’s just so incredibly hard.”
But in the midst of the reverie of shooting came a pandemic and a lockdown. The series had to go on a break before returning to an entirely different atmosphere: the production bubble. Surprisingly, everything still turned out quite fine.
“There was so little time to think about anything apart from the job,” Mortimer says. “I’m such a bloody worrier. I worry about everything. I anticipate horror in my head all the time—the children can’t leave the house without me calling them 25 times an hour to make sure that they’re still alive. And as an actor, I am so full of anxiety and terror and neuroses that [directing] was a completely unusual experience. It didn’t really have that effect [on me]. The job at hand was so engrossing that there wasn’t really room for any of that. And it was, as a result, just like having a holiday for myself.”
The Pursuit of Love, a three-part series released July 30 on Amazon Prime, is Mortimer’s baroquely imaginative take on Mitford’s own sharp perspective. “Reading the book again, getting ready to write it, I felt like, Wow, this really feels like it speaks to me now,” Mortimer says. “And more than I imagined it would, even knowing and loving the book as I did. I read it and I sort of felt forgiven.”
Mortimer’s transformation of the novel relied largely upon making a fairly secondary character much more layered. In the series, Linda’s dull-by-comparison cousin and best friend, Fanny, played by Emily Beecham, becomes a focal point. Fanny looks at her glamorous cousin with a mix of adoration and envy; she carries around Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a choice Mortimer made because of the duality in womanhood expressed by Woolf’s writing; and she constantly wonders if she should have led a riskier, less sensible life. “It was really important to me that [Fanny] came alive,” Mortimer says. “I really related to that character. And I always relate to the ‘shy person with the lion inside them’ character.”
Mortimer plays a part in the series herself: Fanny’s unreliable and impractical mother, referred to as only the Bolter. Mortimer did not like the days where she had to both direct and act, sporting a wig while running around trying to be an authority on set. But, for Mortimer, the Bolter also ties together the emotional battle that takes place between Linda and Fanny.
“[Mitford] doesn’t excavate it quite as much as I did, but it’s definitely all there,” Mortimer tells me. “There’s this dynamic between these two best friends and cousins that was so powerful and interesting. One of them is the quiet, examined one, and then the other one—who’s the one that helps us see the life and love experience, who Fanny is besotted by—is a version of Fanny’s own mother, who abandoned her…. She’s constantly in a state of reenacting that feeling of being abandoned all the time.” Linda’s own mother, Aunt Sadie, is played by Wells—allowing both Doll and Em to preside over this younger generation of women struggling to find their way through a war-torn, socially conservative, upper-class-driven society.
“The Mitford universe is a very specific one,” Mortimer explains. “It’s that moment in time between the [World] wars in England when life was quite fragile, not knowing who’s going to live and who was going to die. And there’s the polarization of the world where families were split down the middle, as they are now politically.
“And Linda’s love life, in a way, is a satire on the politics of the day, of the biggest moments in early 20th-century history. She goes from [marrying] a fascist banker to [dating] a communist activist and both of them are as self-centered as each other. [The novel has] a very particular voice, in a very particular world at a very particular moment. And for that reason, I hope that kind of resonates in a more universal way.”
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