STACK NZ Dec #58

DVD&BD

FEATURE

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EMILY MORTIMER – best known for her role in The Newsroom – relished the chance to write and star with her real life best friend, comedienne Dolly Wells, in the TV series DOLLY & EM , a semi-improvised comedy that explores what happens when an English actress hires her childhood friend to be her personal assistant. Best of Friends

Have you enjoyed your Dolly & Em experience?

Have you learned anything that you didn’t previously know about Dolly during this process? There are things that I already knew that I’m not sure she knew about herself. I knew how brilliant she is and how hilarious, clever and original she is. I don’t know anyone whose mind works like hers. When I’m with Dolly, I laugh harder than I ever do, she’s really funny. She never thought of herself as an artist, but she’s become a great comedy actress. In the time I’ve been writing with her, I think she’s learning that she is an artist as well. She doesn’t totally believe it yet, but I can feel her starting to understand. Is there anything you want viewers to take away from watching the series? We’re being honest about friendships and how difficult it can be to understand life. Doll and I didn’t want to dictate who the audience’s sympathy should lie with, so neither of us are bad people, we just put ourselves in an awful situation where we can both behave rather badly.You should, hopefully, be able to sympathise with both and be irritated by both at times as well.That’s a very important thing about friendships, and life. There aren’t good people and bad people, we’re all good and bad and messy.

EMILY MORTIMER: So far, it has been, touch wood, amazing. It has been a total antidote to all the stresses and strains of normal life.What has been so great is that it’s been an escape and yet we’ve managed to bring our families with us. We’ve been able to take our whole lives with us and make them a part of it. Our husbands and children are here, then we have family and friends on the crew. It’s so cool to be on this adventure together. It has been magical. What has it been like to work with your best friend? Doll and I have been collaborating and working together off camera for many years, trying to write something with it never coming together. So we’d gone through the whole learning curve of what it is to work with your best friend before we arrived here. Between us, we’ve had four children in the time it’s taken us to write this: For a long time, I think our husbands thought it was just an excuse to run up extortionate phone bills across the Atlantic and get on planes to visit each other as often as possible! But I think we were learning what we were interested in and how to work and write together.We had this idea very recently, and it’s amazing how when you suddenly get a good idea you realise how rubbish all your others were.This was so easy by comparison.

Doll and I have been collaborating and working together off camera for many years

You’re playing alternate versions of yourselves in the series. Have you approached these roles like any other or has it been different? It has been different in that I’ve done much less work than I would normally do in preparation for a role.The genesis of the story was in my trailer on the set of The Newsroom, where we filmed a pilot on the fly, guerrilla style. I was working in LA and we were very kindly given permission to shoot on set for half a day and we shot in the house I was really staying in.When we were filming in my trailer, I was throwing water on Dolly’s face for a crying scene before having to go out and film The Newsroom and we were pissing ourselves laughing. It was just fun. It was just me being me and acting on my wits, and it was weirdly easy because I know what I’m like and what Dolly’s like and I know how we talk to each other.We did put time into thinking about the story and how the scenes would work, but flying by the seat of my pants is how I’ve gone about preparing for this.

Dolly & Em Season 5 is out Dec 4

DECEMBER 2014 JB Hi-Fi www.jbhifi.co.nz

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