Emily Mortimer on her son's White Lotus sex scene: ‘It was bizarre'

Times

23-04-2025

Emily Mortimer isn't sure why the producers of Suspect, Disney+'s new drama about the wrongful killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, thought of her for Cressida Dick, but she's glad they did. The actress, most recently seen as the kindly Mrs Brown in Paddington in Peru, knows she was an unlikely fit to play the former Metropolitan Police commissioner. 'But I was intrigued because I remember being in London when that happened, and I was familiar with Dick, the first woman and the first gay officer to lead the police force, so a trailblazer in lots of ways.'
Mortimer, 53, is speaking from a spare room in her Brooklyn home, a Le Corbusier poster on the wall behind her, but on July 21, 2005, she was in London. That day, two weeks after the devastating 7/7 bombings, which killed 52 people and injured more than 770 others, four men tried to detonate bombs on the Underground and on a bus in a second attack. When they failed, the police launched a manhunt that ended with the shooting of de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian electrician, at Stockwell Tube station the next day.
'On the day the bombs didn't go off, I remember that feeling, 'Oh my God, it's happening again,'' says Mortimer. 'And then, oh no, wait, is this a failed attempt? It was something the whole country was feeling — that something awful could happen at any minute.'
Dick oversaw the operation that led to de Menezes's death, but never admitted to any mistake. At the 2008 inquest, dramatised in Suspect, she told the jury it was 'extraordinarily, desperately unfortunate' that de Menezes looked very like one of the bombers, despite photographic evidence that he did not (they had different skin colours, for a start). The drama, written by Jeff Pope (Philomena, Stan & Ollie), painstakingly reconstructs the hunt for the real bombers and the fallout inside Scotland Yard.
As Dick, Mortimer is a world away from her back catalogue of well-bred ladies (Bright Young Things, Mary Poppins Returns) and needy girlfriends (Lovely & Amazing, Match Point), yet they share a surprisingly similar background. Dick's parents were Oxford academics, and she studied at Oxford herself. Mortimer's father was the Rumpole of the Bailey author and criminal barrister John Mortimer, and she too went to Oxford. Was Dick, 64, a type she knew?
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'Not really, because I was arty-farty at university and that wasn't her bag. She was a criminologist, a scientist.' Mortimer did not meet Dick, but listened to her Desert Island Discs episode and read everything she could. 'The notion of service was very important to her. Her grandfather was in the RAF, and there was this sense of duty to your men and loyalty to the institution — because without that everything falls apart.' Before Dick resigned as the Met commissioner in 2022, in the wake of Sarah Everard's murder and a series of related scandals, this was the criticism levelled at her: that her loyalty to her officers outweighed her sense of public accountability.
Getting Dick's inner conviction right was one thing, Mortimer says — 'I was very curious about playing somebody with that level of certainty, which I don't share'— whereas Dick's helmet of hair was another. 'There weren't wigs galore on set — I wasn't measured for one. But I remember looking at a photograph in the make-up trailer and saying, 'I think she might cut her hair herself'. So we hacked at it and that was the key.'
Suspect is the sort of state-of-the-nation TV that used to be made by the terrestrial channels rather than streaming services such as Disney+. Does that matter? 'Mercifully there are still incredible people at the BBC despite it being difficult to raise the same money as Disney or Netflix. It's wonderful that these places are making shows like Suspect and Adolescence. That doesn't mean I don't think the BBC needs to be looked after.'
Alongside Adolescence, the televisual event of 2025 has been The White Lotus, starring Mortimer's son, Sam Nivola, 21, as Lochlan Ratliff, the dreamy youngest child of a lorazepam addict and her bankrupt husband. In a crowded field, Lochlan scored the most memorable scene of season three: a queasy, druggy threesome with the girlfriend of a criminal kingpin and his own brother.
It was Nivola's first sex scene — but, more important, how did his mother feel about watching her son pleasure Arnold Schwarzenegger's son Patrick in front of an audience of 16 million?
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Mortimer laughs. 'It's so crazy, all of it. It wasn't particularly crazier than having my boy go off to Thailand for so long. Of course it was a bit bizarre, but being married to an actor [Alessandro Nivola], we've all had to watch each other do strange things. And I had been warned — although Sam said that the worst bit was the first ten minutes, but they kept flashing back. So I'd relaxed and then it wasn't true at all.'
She was sitting on his bed with her sister Rosie and 15-year-old daughter, May (also an actress), when Sam got the call to say he had been cast. 'And the sweetest part is that Sam has a film production company with his best friend called Cold Worm Productions, after a silly thing from when he was a kid and we used to pretend to be cold worms' — Mortimer demonstrates her startled worm face — 'and the first thing he said when he put the phone down was, 'This is going to be huge for Cold Worm.'' She grins at his innocence.
He has navigated sudden fame better than she ever could, Mortimer says. 'He just sort of owns it, which isn't thanks to either of us. I'm biased because I'm his mum, but he doesn't need any guidance.'
Nivola also played the dreamy son in the adaptation of Don DeLillo's White Noise and, more recently, Netflix's glossy whodunnit The Perfect Couple with Nicole Kidman. Who is the more narcissistic screen mother: Kidman or The White Lotus's Parker Posey? 'Oh, he's had a lot of great actresses be his mum. Parker Posey was a bit more maternal.'
Nepotism is not a dirty word in the Mortimer household: she cast her children and mother in the BBC's The Pursuit of Love (which she wrote and directed, earning a Bafta nomination for her performance as the Bolter, an aristocrat who keeps leaving her husbands) and in Doll & Em, the comedy series she wrote with her best friend, Dolly Wells. Partly it is because it's the most practical option, working with the people closest to hand; partly it is the way Mortimer grew up, in a busy bohemian family with half-siblings from her father's previous marriage (to the novelist Penelope Mortimer) and his affair with the actress Wendy Craig. She thinks of her father when she writes, she says, or tells a story: as a lawyer and author, he taught her to be open-minded, 'to avoid sanctimony at all costs'.
He died in 2009, but she is very close to her mother, Penelope Gollop, whom she describes as 'the most rock'n'roll person I know. She's 79 and she's still up for it. She's got a punk rock spirit, a healthy dose of not giving a f***. I'm hoping some of it will rub off on me — I was always more square.'
Gollop recently gave up smoking, after decades of being begged to do so by her daughters. 'We'd say, 'We don't want you to die, Mum.' And she'd say, 'I'd quite like to die, f*** off.' But she doesn't actually want to die, as it turns out.' Gollop once told a journalist what a relief it was that Emily was marrying Alessandro: her other boyfriends were mostly 'dreadful'. Was that fair? 'No! She had a real soft spot for Alessandro, which she has to this day. Rosie and I think she almost prefers her sons-in-law to us. My boyfriends were wonderful, but Alessandro was the best one for me — and clearly the best one for my mum.'
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In her fifties, Mortimer thinks she is less typecast. She has played the love interest to Hugh Grant, Ewan McGregor, Alec Baldwin and more. But it's not that she always got the girlfriend scripts, she says, 'more that I was this on-the-back-foot person', diffident and happy on the margins. As she inherits more of her mother's punk rock spirit, she is being offered authority-figure roles such as Cressida Dick or Juliette Binoche's opiate-addicted frenemy in The New Look. 'I've given myself permission to go outside myself a bit more,' she says, before puncturing her bubble. 'I mean, it's not like I'm fighting offers off.'
Would she ever move back to England? You can picture the Mortimer-Nivolas in a house full of children, grandchildren and friends, like the Mitfords or the sort of home she grew up in. 'For a long time I used to wonder, and now I think it doesn't work like that. Life takes funny turns and you can't predict it.'
When they moved to Brooklyn in 2003, she would catch the train into the city to go to the theatre 'and I'd think, oh my God, am I going to end up one of these old ladies who sits in New York's theatres, watching plays every day? Now I think that would be really nice.'
Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is on Disney+ from April 30
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