Been There, Felt That

Emily Mortimer is making a mental checklist of her anatomical shortcomings. “Knock-kneed, one eye’s smaller than the other,” she says. “My teeth are a bit yellow, nose is a bit big, flat hair, thin.” Not that the 30-year-old Oxford graduate suffers from a bad self-image, it’s just that for her latest role as a neurotic Angeleno actress in Nicole Holofcener’s “Lovely & Amazing,” she had to put any normal, working actor’s sense of vanity on the line.

Mortimer plays Elizabeth Marks, whose acting career is finally taking off now that her agent has pressured her into sexing up her image for auditions and magazine shoots. Naturally, the role hit home. “I’ve definitely been in some absurd outfit with a thousand people staring at you, feeling totally miserable like you want someone to come and collect you and take you home,” she says. “And the whole thing about auditioning and feeling like you’ve got the job because somebody flirted outrageously with you and then you haven’t. There are many instances where you kind of feel like a whore. And what was interesting about doing this job is that I examined all that, and in the process, I did expose myself and make myself very vulnerable.”

Elizabeth also has a lot of pressure from her family: a caustic and unhappily married older sister (Catherine Keener), an adopted 10-year-old African American sister who wants blond hair (Raven Goodwin), and a mother (Brenda Blethyn) undergoing liposuction. It’s enough to make Elizabeth question the skin she’s in, especially in the film’s most revealing scene: After bedding a handsome A-list actor (Dermot Mulroney)--whose latest project she didn’t get, ironically, because she wasn’t deemed sexy enough--she boldly stands naked before him and asks him to honestly critique her anatomy. It’s the most provocative but desexualized piece of female nudity in indie film since Julianne Moore went bottomless in 1993’s “Short Cuts.” Yet there’s nothing casual and incidental about this scene. It’s full frontal and head-on uncomfortable.

“I knew that if I wanted to do the part, I would have to do the scene. But I remember getting out of bed at that moment in the scene, thinking, ‘This better be a good film,’ ” Mortimer says, with a laugh. “If this is a good film, it’s all right. But if it isn’t, I’m destined for international humiliation.” While the scene was in the original script, Mortimer worked with Holofcener on rewriting it to specifically tailor it to her own complaints about her body. “I had to sit down and think about all the things that freak me out about my body,” she says.

Of course, aside from her willowy, skinny frame, which many actresses would kill for, it’s hard to see any flaws in Mortimer’s porcelain-featured beauty. “The script originally called for someone with fat thighs and a round belly, someone with a more normal body than Emily,” Holofcener says. “But I wanted her so much for the part that I rationalized that it doesn’t really matter what she looks like. There’s plenty of hyper-thin actresses out there who think they’re fat and would make us all throw up if we heard them. So I thought, ‘Well, let her be one of those.’ And she did it beautifully.”

The scene was shot without rehearsals--true to the chaos of indie film, the entire shoot was only three weeks--and with a minimal amount of takes so that Mortimer wouldn’t be naked for long. “There were maybe five people there, all men besides me and Emily,” Holofcener says, “all kind of courteously looking away, like the boom operator’s trying to boom them without looking. Everyone felt very protective of her.”

Mortimer admits she has a lot in common with the insecure Elizabeth. One of the character’s biggest quirks is that she’s always taking in stray dogs, whether they want to be rescued. Mortimer confides she has similar obsessions. “I worry constantly about being a good person,” she says.

Her “Lovely & Amazing” co-star Brenda Blethyn, who also plays her mother in the as-yet-unreleased “The Sleeping Dictionary,” vouches for her. “Oh yes!” she says. “She sent me quite a big check the other day because I run the London Marathon for children with leukemia. But I think it was because it made her laugh so much that I was running a marathon.”

At one point, Mortimer’s preoccupation with civic duty led her to volunteer at a London refuge for Russian asylum seekers. Fluent in Russian from her days at Oxford, she went to help. “I thought, ‘Oh brilliant! I can exorcise my guilt,’ ” she says jokingly. “Of course, in a desperate bid to be liked, I had given everybody my number. I was hounded for six months and I had about five or six regulars, sweet old men that I’d be driving to dental appointments in Lewisham. In the end, I just had to drop them. I felt so desperate, like, ‘My God, I’m not good enough to do good work.’ ”

Born and raised in Oxfordshire, Mortimer is the daughter of famed writer and barrister John Mortimer (“Rumpole of the Bailey”) and Penelope, a homemaker mom. Despite play-acting detergent commercials on the stairs for her parents as a little girl, she never seriously considered the profession.

At the age of 17, she went on a trip to Russia and fell in love with the country. “Moscow has this strange effect on English middle-class schoolgirls,” she says. “It really was an extraordinary thing for me because I led this very protected life up until then. It was my coming of age, and it coincided with Russia’s coming of age in a weird way because the wall had just come down and everything was changing.” In 1990, she entered Lincoln College at Oxford University to study English literature, and in her third year she became a double major, adding Russian to her curriculum and spending two terms at the Moscow Arts Theater Drama School.

During her senior year in Oxford in 1994, a classmate’s mother who was a William Morris agent saw her in a school play and began sending her on auditions. She made her debut the following year in a TV miniseries, a period potboiler titled “Catherine Cookson’s The Glass Virgin”--”I was the Glass Virgin,” she says, groaning. “Suddenly I was running about on some moor in a bodice and being paid an awful lot of money. And it was kind of like, ‘Well, I’ll just sort of do this until....’ It was like a holiday job or something to pass the time and amuse my friends.”

But subsequent roles followed in BBC miniseries and TV movies, including a starring role as an oversexed, emotionally troubled young woman in a PBS Masterpiece Theater production of “Cider With Rosie” (1998), written by her father. She did theater, and received glowing notices for her work in “The Lights” at London’s Royal Court Theatre and as Portia in “The Merchant of Venice” at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre. She also began appearing in a string of high-profile Hollywood films, although those roles were largely blink and miss starting with her 1996 stint as Val Kilmer’s wife in “The Ghost and the Darkness.”

“I was definitely the wife,” she says. “It was my third job ever and I was sent to South Africa to do like three scenes. I said, ‘I’ll miss you.’ And ‘Write me.’ And, ‘Go on, you can do it, you build your bridges.’ It wasn’t exactly an Oscar-winning performance.’ ”

Still, Mortimer found herself landing more small roles in more prominent films. She played Cate Blanchett’s devoted lady-in-waiting in “Elizabeth,” and a spoiled actress who is gutted in “Scream 3.” “I loved it. It was hilarious to audition for it, this preppy, geeky girl from Oxfordshire. It was an extraordinary feeling to get slashed. Because you don’t realize how you haven’t screamed since you were a tiny thing. I’m sure people pay therapists in order to be able to do that.”

And in “Notting Hill,” she played Perfect Girl, a slight variation on her lovely West London self, although Hugh Grant passed her over for Julia Roberts. “I felt that was kind of justified,” Mortimer says. “She’s a movie star.”

The bit-player work lead to meatier roles in undistinguished fare, including Bruce Willis’ love interest in “The Kid” and a job in Kenneth Branagh’s all-singing, all-dancing Busby Berkeley riff on Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” “Luckily, all I had to do was shuffle around a bit in the background,” she says. Although the film was a flop, it was also fortuitous for introducing her to actor Alessandro Nivola, her boyfriend of three years; she commutes to his Hollywood Hills home from her flat in Ladbroke Grove. “I’m still resisting not calling London my home,” she confesses. “I do really like it here, it’s just that I like to leave as well. It’s just important to me that I feel there are other things going on in the world and not just a tiny scary environment.”

Her biggest roles are on their way. This fall, she plays a villain in the big-budget sci-fi thriller “Formula 51,” directed by Hong Kong action auteur Ronny Yu. “I play a gun-toting motorbike-riding hit woman all in leather,” she says proudly. When asked if she was daunted by her fighting scenes with roughnecks Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Carlyle, she laughs. “They’re just babies, really.”

Mortimer just finished shooting “Young Adam,” a moody drama about ‘50s-era beatniks in Glasgow with Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton. “It is based on a novel, kind of a Glaswegian ‘On the Road,’ ” she says. “It’s misanthropic and kind of worrying because it’s totally amoral. There are no real boundaries and you’re really unsure where it stands. The film doesn’t make any judgments.”

She’s also quietly following in her father’s footsteps with a career as a writer. She penned a fiction column for the London Daily Telegraph in the voice of a struggling young actress who invariably says or does the wrong thing, and she’s tackling her first screenplay, an adaptation of Lorna Sage’s harrowing girlhood memoir, “Bad Blood,” to be directed by Hettie MacDonald (“Beautiful Thing”).

For someone who seems to have stumbled into acting, it sounds as though Mortimer has learned how to hatch more of a master plan. “I have recently started to get a strategy,” she admits. “Because I finally realized I did an awful lot of, ‘Isn’t it hilarious? I’m wearing this wig and running through the moors.’ It was kind of funny but not funny if you’re going to carry on doing it.”

Mortimer says she’s been pleased with the sensitivity the press has shown her during her publicity appearances for “Lovely & Amazing,” but she concedes that her next film, “Formula 51,” is fodder for Stuff and Maxim magazines.

“That’s much more boys-magazine type stuff, so that’s involved quite a lot of saying no to those kinds of things,” she says. “I don’t feel comfortable wearing bikinis in photo shoots, but it’s so nerve-racking to say never. It’s so hard to have integrity. I don’t even know what it really means in this profession. But one thing it is for me is being open to suggestion and not boring yourself or other people. Being able to be more than one thing. And seeing where that takes you.”

Kevin Maynard is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.