“I was longing to be the femme fatale,” says Emily Mortimer. It’s mid-afternoon in Brooklyn, just before the schools let out, and we’re sitting in an empty room at the back of a restaurant. Mortimer is wearing a grey blazer, a brown Argyle jumper and a blue denim shirt. “I was like, ‘God, I’d love to be a femme fatale’,” she says. “I never get cast as a femme fatale.”
She tends to play charming, bubbly, earnest characters. Early in her film career, in Notting Hill, she played an English rose, who is referred to in the script notes as the “perfect girl”. And even as a hard-charging truth-seeker in Aaron Sorkin’s television series The Newsroom, she still had this wholesomeness about her.
