A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
In the HBO comedy series “Doll & Em,” real life best friends Dolly Wells and Emily Mortimer play fictional best friends, known as Doll and Em.
The show is now in its second season. The central plot involves Doll and Em writing and producing a play starring themselves — or people strongly resembling themselves. Both Mortimer and Wells’ husbands are also in the show, as are their kids and even Mortimer’s dog.
But don’t get confused, this show isn’t about the actual lives of Emily and Dolly — even if those are the names of the characters. The self-reflective elements of the show are too many to name, but that really isn't what the show is about.
The Frame's John Horn spoke with Emily Mortimer.
What universal themes — underneath and through the meta elements — did you want to get at with the show’s second season?
The second season is in a way more subtle. There’s still the kind of psychodrama that happens between two people who love each other very much, who have a slightly, sort of co-dependent relationship. But there [are] other themes in the second season. There was the theme with the uneasy kind of relationship with feminism that women of our age sometimes have, or can have. That was something we felt like it would be good to be honest about because it’s a thorny subject and a difficult one to discuss— difficult in any arena apart from fiction, I find. There was something very cathartic about having these characters get very confused about what it is to be a, sort of, strong woman on the show. Whereas in real life it’s hard to have those conversations somehow because it’s such a political topic.
I’m wondering, as you're thinking about what you’re trying to say about strong women, are you taking into consideration women’s lack of representation behind the camera?
No, I don’t think we were on a crusade in any way to show how capable women are of doing things. It’s sort of more subtle than that. It’s grappling with the idea of being confident in yourself and not letting yourself down ... And there’s another element to the second season, another theme we were consciously bringing into it is a sort of expatriation thing going on. And part of Doll and Em’s confusion about what kind of women to be is the feeling that, back home, there isn’t a tradition of being strong confident women who are very easy talking about past same-sex relationships they may have had. [Women] who have a sort of a sexual confidence as well as an intellectual confidence. And in England we suffer from this terrible disease, you must have noticed, of sort of completely addictive modesty. And it’s very difficult to carry off being ambitious in England.
You’re talking about this very personally and I wonder if it’s something you’ve experienced having lived in England and now living in New York.
Definitely. In fact I can remember one of my first experiences of coming to L.A. and going to a Hollywood party. Alessandro, my husband, had gone to the loo or something. I was at the bar and there was this man and we were both getting a drink. He was a producer or something so he said, “What do you do?” And I said, “Oh I’m an actress.” And I was so embarrassed that I was telling this man that I was an actress. I felt like, gosh, that’s the most predictable thing I could be saying. I sort of wanted to make it more interesting or something. So then he said, “Really?” And I said, “Yes, but I’m not a good one.” I mean, I could see the wires inside his brain kind of fizz. It did not compute. He looked so confused and, sort of, panic stricken and he wanted to get very far away from me. Because I made this statement because that just didn’t make any sense.
Why did you say it, do you think?
I just said it to make him laugh. But I realized that kind of humor, that kind of self-deprecating humor, it just doesn’t compute here.
The second season also has a lot to say about balancing life and work and family and how difficult that is in any career. When you and Dolly are talking about that, what were the important things you wanted to address in this season?
The fictional marriage we’ve created in the second season is kind of an amalgam of the marriages we both have and of other marriages we know of. But what we kept coming back to when we were writing it was that we don’t want there to be a goodie or a baddie in this marriage. You know, Em’s husband seems to be at home with the kids and you think, well, maybe he’s a stay-at-home husband. And then, as the season goes on, you start to reveal, no, he’s an artist himself. They’re both talking about how much they’ve done to contribute to the family ... and how many times they picked the children up from school that week. And that just seemed like very familiar territory for two working people who are married and bringing up children and both feeling both guilty and resentful about how much or how little they’re doing to contribute.
I’m wondering if working on this show, writing this show, is somehow therapeutic. You get to talk about things that you’re thinking about and express them — and grapple with them.
Yes, it really is. It’s very therapeutic. You know, I’ve just been doing a lot of press for this show in the last few days. But you know, it’s so much harder having conversations about what it is that you do than it is actually doing the thing that you do ... I’ve actually been having those conversations over and over again. You’re always asked what it’s like to balance work and family. You’re always asked about what it’s like to be a woman in Hollywood, a woman in the film business. You’re always asked about what it’s like to get older as a woman in the film business. But these are important questions and they’re ones that, of course, one is really thinking about and grappling with all the time. And so, to get the chance to really deal with them and deal with them in a kind of way that is comic and heightened, and kind of pull the rug out from underneath all of it, it’s great. It’s like an answer to all those questions that feels more satisfying than a sort of platitudinous soundbite in an interview.